The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing. As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine. I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But, oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous, introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god? Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little attendant gods by name that will come to the festival. What a wine! I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a providence for pilgrims.' So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and went up on my way to Rome.