After she had gone, we stayed a long while up on the hot roof, watching the dark shadows creep from under the broken bridge across the rippling Rhône, as it swept past towards the sea. And I wondered more drowsily than ever concerning old Jeanne-Marie Latou, and her soldier nephew, with the _spahis_, away over there in Tunis, and that great journey of hers to Marseilles—eighteen of them from the dead little town below, “_femmes et filles et trois garçons, dans un train ‘ambulant’—quatre francs et douze sous, aller et retour_.” [Sidenote: ASCENSION DAY AT ARLES] The population pours out from mass, flooding every crooked street—rubicund peasants in starched Sunday blouses; olive-skinned, Greek-featured _Arlésiennes_ in quaint, lace head-dresses; strutting _petits messieurs en chapeau rond_ and tight-fitting _complets_; shouting shoals of boys; zouaves, indolent and superb, in flowing red knickerbockers, white spats, and jauntily-poised fez. A bleating of lambs, plaintive, incessant and dirge-like, fills the _Place du Forum_; heaped over the gravel they lie, their legs tied under their bellies, and their skinny necks helplessly outstretched: and beyond, the great, green umbrellas of a regiment of wrinkled beldams—fruit-sellers encamped in rows before their baskets.... A strange complication of odours—of cheese, of fish and of flowers—floats in the air: at every alley-corner some auctioneer stands posted—shouting, perspiring vendors of knives, pocket-books, glass-cutters, chromo-lithographs, cement, songs, _sabots_. An old top-hatted Jew nasally vaunts a wine-testing fluid, and tells horrible and interminable tales of vintages manufactured from decayed dates, from vinegar and sugar, or from plaster-of-Paris; a travelling pedicure operates on the box-seat of a gorgeously-painted van, to the accompaniment of a big drum and clashing cymbals; the inevitable strong man defiantly challenges the crowd to split a flag-stone across his bare, hirsute chest; and a blind-folded fortune-telling wench chaunts with mechanical shamelessness the young men’s amorous indiscretions. Outside the town, the boulevard is gay with the glitter of pedlars’ wares, and flapping, gaudy stuffs, red, green and yellow and blue; travelling showmen are bustling with final preparations, hammering together their skeleton booths, or unfolding gaunt rolls of battered canvas; the steam-orchestra of a _Grand Musée fin de siècle_ bellows from its rows of brass-mouthed trumpets a deafening, wheezy tune; and everywhere, beneath the tunnel of pale green plane-trees, a thick, drifting tide of men and women. [Sidenote: SPRING IN BÉARN May 1] Of a sudden it seems to have come—the poplars fluttering their golden green; the fruit-trees tricked out in fête-day frocks of frail snow-white; the hoary oaks uncurling their baby leaves; and the lanes all littered with golden broom....