And the day was an August hazy dream of a day. We wound along the mountain roads, first under overhanging greenery and then, almost suddenly, remote, in blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dôme mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like rolling hillocks; but here and there a little white streak showed that the snow still lingered and would linger on until the frosts of autumn bound it in chains to await the universal winding-sheet of winter. Climate varied with the varying altitude of the route. Here, on a last patch of mountain ground, were a man or two and a woman or two and odd children, reaping and binding; there, after a few minutes' ascent, on another sloping patch, a solitary peasant ploughed with his team of oxen. Everywhere on the declivitous waysides, tow-haired, blue-eyed children guarded herds of goats, as their forbears had done in the days of Vercingetorix, the Gaul. Nowhere, save in the dimly seen remotenesses of the valleys, where vestiges of red-roofed villages emerged through the fertile summer green, was there sign of habitation. Whence came they, these patient humans, wresting their life from these lonely spots of volcanic wildernesses? Now and then, on a lower hump of mountain, appeared the ruined tower of a stronghold fierce and dominating long ago. There the lord had all the rights of the _seigneur_, as far as his eye could reach. He had men-at-arms in plenty, and could ride down to the valley and could provision himself with what corn and meat he chose, and could return and hold high revel. But when the winter came, how cold must he have been, for all the wood with its stifling smoke that he burned in his crude stone hall. And Madame the Countess, his wife, and her train of highborn young women--imagine the cracking chilblains on the hands of the whole fair community. "Does the guide-book say that?" asked Auriol, on my development of this pleasant thesis. "Is a guide-book human?" "It doesn't unweave rainbows. As a _cicerone_ you're impossible. I regret Horatio Bakkus."