This water feast-day was a part of the biennial pilgrimage to the Sainte-Estelle of the Felibrige and the Cigaliers: the two Felibrien societies maintained in Paris by the children of the South of France. Through twenty-three dreary months those expatriated ones exist in the chill North; in the blessed twenty-fourth month--always in burning August, when the melons are luscious ripe and the grapes are ripening, when the sun they love so well is blazing his best and the whole land is a-quiver with a thrilling stimulating heat--they go joyously southward upon an excursion which has for its climax the great Felibrien festival: and then, in their own gloriously hot Midi, they really live! By a semi-right and by a large courtesy, we of America were of this gay party. Four years earlier, as the official representatives of an American troubadour, we had come upon an embassy to the troubadours of Provence; and such warm relations had sprung up between ourselves and the poets to whom we were accredited that they had ended by making us members of their own elect body: the Society of the Felibrige--wherein are united the troubadours of these modern times. As Felibres, therefore, it was not merely our right but our duty to attend the festival of the Sainte-Estelle; and our official notification in regard to this meeting--received in New York on a chill day in the early spring-time--announced also that we were privileged to journey on the special steamboat chartered by our brethren of Paris for the run from Lyons to Avignon down the Rhone. II We were called at five o'clock in the morning. Even the little birds of Lyons were drowsy at that untoward and melancholy hour. As I slowly roused myself I heard their sleepy twitterings out in the trees on the Cours du Midi--and my sympathies were with them. There are natures which are quickened and strengthened by the early day. Mine is not such. I know of nothing which so numbs what I am pleased to term my faculties as to be _particeps criminis_ in the rising of the sun. But life was several shades less cheerless by the time that we left the Hotel Univers--which I ever shall remember gratefully because it ministered so well, even in the very midst of the driving bustle of the Lyons Exposition, to our somewhat exacting needs--and went down to the river side. Already the mists of morning had risen, and in their place was the radiant sunshine of the Midi: that penetrating, tingling sunshine which sets the blood to dancing and thence gets into the brain and breeds extravagant fancies there which straightway are uttered as substantial truths--as M. Daudet so often has told us; and also, when writing about this his own dearly-loved birth-land, so often has demonstrated in his own text.