pleasant place. Sometimes I think the beasts have the best of it. The barns here are as large as churches. Built against the side of the mountain, they have two entrances, each on the level of the ground: the higher story forms the barn, the lower the byre. I have sometimes counted as many as twenty windows, set some two metres apart, along one side of those huge stone structures. Here from mid-November till mid-May the cattle live under cover, chew the cud and see in memory, no doubt, the meadows hard by with their delicious grass and the aromatic pastures on the mountain-top. Here in February and March the calves are born. Nothing is quainter than to see their wild delight, their leaps, their bounds, their joy, their tearing races, their frantic gambols, [Illustration: THE FARM AT OLMET] when, for the first time in their lives, they come forth into the green fields and balmy air of May. The pigsties, airy, spacious, comfortable, form a long line near the farm. The swine, too, are kept close in winter, but in summer they roam all over the hillsides and munch the grass like sheep. The pigs here are, I think, the ugliest and perhaps the wittiest in the world--great long-backed, long-legged creatures, far larger than a sheep. They climb the rocky fells, scamper down the smooth sides of the combes, trot all night after the herds to the mountain farm in summer, are hardy, inquisitive, and sociable, beyond belief. With their coal-black heads and pink, naked bodies, my sister says they remind her of the famous _Dame au Masque_. But they have no shame of their ugliness, and, when they hear a friendly voice on the other side the hedge, come trooping down from the top of the field to pass the time of day, with all the ease and assurance of an honoured acquaintance. A natural humour enlivens their indecent countenance--for, in France, a _cochon_ is always indecent, and Madame Langeac, when she speaks to her social superiors, seldom forgets to call the pigs “_les habillés de soie_.” (One day I asked her the destination of a cool, stone-floored room: “_Sauf votre respect, madame_,” she replied, “_elle sert pour saler les habillés de soie_.”) Clad in silk or clad in bristles (the two words are the same in French), at least during their lifetime our wide-wandering mountain-swine have a good time of their own; and, though it is natural in humans to esteem them chiefly in their ulterior form of ham, I believe we should miss them from the landscape. We have a proverb in our parts which says of a pair of friends that they are “_Camarades comme cochons_”--or _sochons_, as we say in Auvergne. In vain, a learned professor of Clermont has sought to explain away the unseemly word as a corruption of the Latin _socius_. Why should we say, “Camarades comme _socius_?” There’s no meaning in it. Glance at the hills, my good Don, and see the friendly creatures ambling about, in pairs or little troops, knocking their heads together, grunting out their gossip or their