As you are fond of dog-lore, here is a sample from Auvergne. Just opposite our hotel lives the young Scotch (not Irish, as I think I called him last week) doctor. His wife owns a clever pug, whose friendship any self-respecting dog would be anxious, I should say, to cultivate. One of the rather scratch-pack gathered for the coming fox-chase, who wandered as they pleased about the town, seems to have shared my view, for every morning, between _café_ and _déjeûner_, he came and paid a visit of about five minutes to Mrs. Gilchrist’s pug, in the doctor’s vestibule, always open to man and dog. At the end of his call, he trotted off down the avenue to whatever other business he might have in hand. Now, his visits could not have been amatory, as both are of the masculine sex, nor could they have been gastronomic, for he invariably refused the food which Mrs. Gilchrist offered him. What other conclusion is possible than that he came to talk over the gossip afloat in the dog-world of La Bourboule? Lastly, as to the excursions. These are numerous, and very interesting in all ways, for you drive through great, sad pine-forests (in which I was astonished to see many of the trees gray with the weeping moss which makes the Louisiana and Texas forests so melancholy) and breezy heaths all aglow with wild flowers, getting every now and then indescribably glorious glimpses of the rich plain which stretches away from this backbone of Central France to the Alps. The flora is quite beyond me, but I recognised many varieties of heart’s-ease, fox-gloves, gentians, amongst them an exquisite blue variety, and the air was often scented with meadow-sweet or wild-thyme. Then almost every mountain-top is crowned by a peculiarly shaped block of dark rock, which looks as if some huge saurian, disgusted with a changing world, had crawled up there to die and get petrified. They must, however, have been even bigger than the _Atlanlosaurus immanis_, the biggest of the family yet found, I believe. I well remember the delight of Dr. Agnew, of New York, when the American geologists came upon its thigh bone, two feet longer than that of any European monster. It had become agate, and I have a scarf-pin made of a polished fragment, and presented to me by the triumphant doctor. I cannot tell you what these rocks really are, as I made no ascent, preferring nowadays, like dear Lowell, “to make my ascents by telescope.”