The Félibres came in time to give a new lease of life to the fast-decaying patois of Auvergne. Under their auspices there is published at Aurillac a local paper, _Lo Cobreto_ (The Bagpipes); for the bagpipes, as befits a Celtic country, is our national instrument, and we dance a stately sort of reel, more like a minuet, _la bourrée_. _Lo Cobreto_, of course, is written in patois, not by peasants, but, as in Provence, by middle-class men of letters who have made the dialect their hobby. If Mistral next summer should visit Aurillac as he proposes, they would give him a great banquet, as they did some years ago for Felix Gras; and the peasants and small shopkeepers would turn out to stare at and do homage to the Laureate of Languedoc. Our cousin Vermenouze would recite him an ode in patois, for Vermenouze is the local genius and _copiscol_, or chief of the school of Auvergne. Fancy Don Quixote turned poet and sportsman, pious and chivalrous as ever, with a cross stuck in his cravat, a blessed medal at his watch-chain, a gun in his hand, a fishing-rod under his arm, and a volume of Mistral or Virgil in his pocket. As like as not he has also a pipe in his mouth; and on his feet, perhaps, a pair of sabots. “Jéu pouorte pas toutchiour, quond tourne de lo casso, Lèbre, perdigal ou becasso, Mès, se trobe plus res, pes puets ou pes trobèrs Li culisse ou min fouorço bèrs, O plenoi mos e per doutchino, Deis bèrs de brousso que sentou lo soubotchino” (“I do not always bring home, when I return from shooting, a hare, a partridge, or a snipe. But if I find nothing else on the peaks and on the fells, at least I gather plenty of verses, by handfuls and by dozens; verses, made of heather, verses with a wilding scent”)--no description could be better than the poet’s own. Such is the _copiscol_; an old bachelor, devoted to family, kinsmen, country; no poet has sung less of love or more sincerely of home and Nature. The moors round St. Paul-des-Landes, where the wild duck and snipe troop by in March, where the partridge rustles in autumn, and the startled hare bounds from the tussocked grass; the _buron_ on the mountain, the life of the farm in the village, the great distant Puys on the horizon; such are the subjects of his muse. Last year, I grieved that such a poet should write for men who seldom read. But my little Auvergnate housemaid tells me that his poems are recited in the market-place at Aurillac on holiday afternoons. What poet could wish for more?