autumn, melons and asparagus, artichokes and cardoons, green peas, French beans and scarlet-runners--such, in fact, as make some decorative show; for this first garden is a favourite place for sheltered walking. To the second garden are relegated the salads of different sorts: lettuce and _romaine_, spinach and sorrel, scarole, celery and chicory, capucin’s beard and _bette_ and endive; while in the third grow the cabbages, carrots, turnips, parsnips, Japanese crosnes, Jerusalem artichokes, Brussels sprouts, onions, leeks, potatoes, and their kind. Above the suite of gardens, which occupy the lower slope of a gentle rise, runs a natural fringe of copse-wood; below, the upper road from Tours to Ballan divides them from a considerable vineyard, which bears, on a little holm, a fourth walled garden, or _clos_, filled with orchard trees of a finer sort than those planted everywhere about the fields. This is especially sacred to those golden plums for which the country round Tours is celebrated. The small estate of the Commanderie comprises some two hundred and forty acres (96 hectares), of which fifty-five are laid out in park or woods, forty in pasture, thirty-five in vineyards, eighty in arable land for corn, about thirty in orchards and gardens. It has amused me to compare this distribution with that of Ausonius’ _herediolus_, or small family estate, which, though it seemed a very little property in Roman Gaul, was more than twice as large as the Commanderie. The fourth-century poet, who takes us into his confidence on all occasions, does not forget to lay before us the plan of his ancestral inheritance near Bordeaux. He had some fifty acres of pasture, one hundred acres of vineyard, two hundred acres of corn-land, and about as much forest as cultivated land. But to return to modern times and the Commanderie. The vineyards, with their five and thirty acres, cover far less space than formerly, for in October, 1885, the dreaded phylloxera made its appearance in Touraine, surely and gradually spreading desolation. All the vineyards of the estate before us have been replanted in the last eight years with American roots, which are invulnerable to the trans-atlantic pest, and chiefly with _Rupestris_ and _Riparia_, especially the vine of the latter sort called _Gloire de Touraine_. On these are grafted the native vines--the expense of the whole process of uprooting, ploughing, planting and grafting costing not less than sixty pounds sterling for the hectare--that is to say, for two and a half English acres. After four or five years the new plants begin to yield abundantly, especially if they are budded with the prolific vines of the country, the purple _Gros lot_ or white _Folle Blanche_, either of which produces an excellent _vin ordinaire_. At the Commanderie, where the grafts are all of the finer sort, the yield, in the best years, does not exceed some forty hectolitres to the hectare. Twice as much is frequent in the fruitful South.