The town itself is regularly built, with good leading streets, and possesses a large market–place, where goods of all kinds, even broadcloths, are sold in open stalls; and as Pau is the centre of a very large rural population, it is on market days a busy place; but there are many good shops in some of the best streets, and the wares are, I think, cheaper than in Nice and elsewhere in the Riviera. The two town churches, St. Martin’s and St. Jacques, are new and of white stone, and with their fine tapering spires are externally handsome, but internally, except for their stained–glass windows, want the richness of ornamentation we had seen in so many other Roman Catholic churches abroad. * * * * * The grand sight at Pau is the chain of the Pyrenees. We had only to go a short way along the country road, in which the Pension Colbert is, to see them. But a more uninterrupted prospect is had from the Boulevard du Midi, or terrace of the Place Royale, in front of the prominent buildings I have already mentioned. Leaning upon the parapet wall of this fine terrace, and looking almost straight down upon the valley below, one sees beyond the road and a small outlying portion of the town and the railway station, the river Gave flowing sluggishly along, crossed by a handsome low stone bridge of, I think, five arches, and lined on both sides by rows of tall poplar and other trees, and bordered by straggling houses, which give some character to the scene. Then, on the other side, there rises a range of well–wooded knolls and hills, called the Côteaux of Juraçon and Gelos, the highest about 300 feet in height, and dotted over among the trees by mansions; and then apparently the ground dips behind them, and in the distance (the nearest being twenty miles off) the long range of the Pyrenees stretches out in a continuous line eastward and westward as far as the eye can see, and forming the natural boundary and barrier between the two great countries France and Spain. Rising abruptly and prominently out of the range like two great tusks, are the Pic de Midi d’Ossau, to appearance nearly opposite Pau, and the grandest of the Pyrenees; and away to the eastward, the Pic de Gers; while still farther to the east, but eclipsed by intervening heights scarcely visible from Pau, the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, each of them, or at least the first and last mentioned, from 10,000 to 11,000 feet high. From the upper windows of the hotels on this Boulevard the view must be magnificent. It was very fine from the windows of the Chateau, but they are of a low elevation. This view, perhaps the finest in France, is really the great attraction to the hotels in this quarter, for nowhere else does it seem possible to obtain the prospect from so high a position, and so free from intervening obstructions. When we were at Pau, there was no snow upon the Pyrenees, so that we failed to see them in their best. Even,