A queer mixture of suppressed artistic emotions and avowed culinary preoccupations. Shades of Rousseau and Wordsworth, to mention the nightingale and the ortolans in one breath! But one thing at least we must be thankful for is his lack of pretence and conventional admiration. It is, after all, refreshing to find a traveler who does not copy from his guidebook and does not fall into raptures and worked-up ecstasies. He came back through "Luc, Brignolles, Avignon, Vaucluse", simply noting that "there are fine trout in the stream of Vaucluse and the valley abounds particularly with nightingales." He saw Nîmes, Montpellier, Frontignan, where he discussed the manufacture and price of wine; he passed through Carcassonne and was much interested in the canal and "the carp caught there", but did not mention the walls; he stayed several days at Bordeaux, measured the remains of a Roman amphitheater and made a thorough study of the wines; "Chateau Margau, La Tour de Ségur, Hautbrion, Chateau de la Fite, Pontac, Sauternes, Barsac." He visited Nantes, Rennes, Angers, Tours, and ascertained the truth of the allegations of the famous "growth of shells unconnected with animal bodies" mentioned by Voltaire and discussed in the "Notes on Virginia." He saw Chanteloup and heard a nightingale there, but was far more interested in "an ingenious contrivance to hide the projecting steps of a stair-case." The same utilitarian preoccupation reappears most conspicuously in his "Memorandums on a Tour from Paris to Amsterdam, Strasburg, and back to Paris" (March, 1788). At Amsterdam he studied the Dutch wheelbarrow, the canal to raise ships over the Pampus, joists of houses, the aviary of Mr. Ameshoff near Harlem; he made a sketch of the Hope's House "of a capricious appearance yet a pleasant one"--an architectural atrocity if ever there was one. At Düsseldorf "the gallery of paintings is sublime", but equally interesting is the hog of this country (Westphalia) "of which the celebrated ham is made which sells at eight and a half pence sterling the pound." If he saw the cathedral at Cologne he forbore to mention it, but at Coblenz he had his first taste of the Moselle wine. It would be cruel to reproduce his description of the "clever ruin at Hanau, with the hermitage in which is a good figure of a hermit in plaster, colored to the life, with a table and a book before him, in the attitude of contemplation."