"How, monsieur?" he replied, after so long a pause that I feared he did not understand me; "the Hôtel de St. Jean no longer exists. It has been closed a year and more." We looked at each other in silent disgust; and he looked at us. We were fairly tired out. "Would you have the kindness, then, to tell us which is the best hotel?" I said with resignation. "I will conduct you to the Hôtel de St.----," he answered, quickly. "It is an hotel of the first class." But when I saw the Hôtel de St. ----, we knew him for a swindler. It was a miserable place, and we would have none of it. We courteously said that we did not like it. He insisted. We broke away from him, and in a few minutes came upon the Hôtel de St. Jean, its doors open to welcome us, and the light pouring ruddily from its windows. The story is trivial: I tell it because it was my ill-luck more than once to fall into the hands of this kind of tout, and be deceived by the tale that the house to which I had been advised to go was shut. On one occasion, at Guelmah, in Algeria, I was lured while inquiring for the Hôtel d'Orient into the Hôtel Auriol, a miserable place. In the morning I looked out of my window, and to my astonishment saw the name of the hotel in which I believed myself to be staring me in the face, painted up in large letters over the door of a house on the farther side of the square. I rubbed my eyes and wondered, and it was not until I stood in the open, and read the name of one and the other, that I recognized with a hearty laugh how I had been taken in. From Agen, on a fine, sunny morning, we went by rail to Moissac. Here, attached to the church, is the most delightful cloister in the world, a cloister rich in arches and capitals of delicate tracery poised on slender shafts, and half hidden by luxuriant creepers, through which the light falls soft and green-tinged, as in some sea-grotto. It is a place for rest and reflection, perfectly adapted to a hot climate; whereas, he who has only seen the dull, dank portico enclosing danker grave-stones, the play-ground of cats--which in England we call a cloister--does not know what the thing is. This church boasted also a quaint doorway enriched with the more or less coarse designs in which the monks of yore took pleasure: a doorway reputed to be one of the most curious in France. From Moissac we went on foot to Castel Sarrasin, sometimes by the Tarn, but for the most part by the side of the great canal; and always, whether by the latter or the river, moving in a soft symphony of various greens, green streams, green poplars--and oh! such vistas of them!--green willows, green banks--all mingled together and fading into one another, and harmoniously blending as the evening fell with the pale pea-green of the eastern sky. It was a peaceful and silent walk through a world of restful hues.