Sometimes, as we come home at nightfall from our walk, I hear, high up in the bracken and the broom, a small keen voice singing shrilly, some large and doleful verse maybe of _lou Grondo_ (_la Grande_), the endless patois chant our peasants sing; or perhaps a stanza of the _Marseillaise_. Some poor child up there is growing frightened in the dusk! Ours is a Celtic country, full of phantoms, elves, and fairies. Who knows but the huntsman with his spectral rout may dash out of yonder hollow? There is also, and especially, the Drac, a subtle spirit whose dear delight it is to play pranks at twilight on the little herds--a Proteus imp who can change into any shape, who plaits the cattle’s tails and manes into inextricable mats, who pulled Touéno’s ears only last November, one evening as he sat upon the hill, leaving the child half-dead with fear. Who but the Drac misleads the baby cowherds when they and their cattle take a wrong turning, when nights are dark? ’Twas he, most likely, who placed the stone on which our Corrado slipped and broke her leg. It is scant comfort, so far afield and quite alone, to remember that he is no respecter of persons; or how, one chilly winter’s night, he pulled the farmer’s wife herself right out of bed. Nothing is sacred to the Drac! More cause for fear! Sing louder, little shepherd, and I’ll join in, down here in the lane, to hearten up your courage! IV Yesterday, we drove to the _buron_ on the mountain. _Buron_ is a local word, which we fondly believe to be derived from the Greek, a relic perhaps of antique settlers, in the south, near Marseilles; however this may be, it is not patois: in our dialect, we call the buron, _lou mosut_--“the little house.” Has not Vermenouze sung the little red-tiled hut, on the summit of the mountain, “like a young cock, red and small, reared up there in his glory, in the middle of the blue sky.” “Lou mosut, coumo un golitchiou Quilhat omoun, rougi e pitchiou, Ol mièt dèl cieu blus, dins lo glorio.” However we may call it, a _buron_ expresses a little lonely habitation on the mountain, almost a hut, where the neatherds sleep in summer, and where the cheese is made, day after day, from the end of May till mid-October. It is a long climb from Olmet to the plateau whereon these little cheese-farms multiply and prosper. The road, in steep zigzags, mounts the hill; we leave the pasture behind us, and the fields of flowering buckwheat, and even the high heathery ridge of the _Pas du Luc_; we enter the hanging beechwoods and crawl up the wall of the cliff, until lo! we emerge on a great sea of undulating pasture-land, apparently illimited, save here and there by a grey mountain peak. The foreground is studded with tiny red-roofed _burons_, each shaded by its group of centenary limes.