one of the English adventurers who did all manner of mischief in the Rouergue some five or six centuries ago.  Such ham and eggs in her case could only be explained by the theory of hereditary ideas.  Nevertheless, she had become French enough to look at me with a dubious, albeit a good-natured eye.  My motive in coming there and going farther without having any commercial object in view was more than she could fathom.  After my visit to the dairy I fancy her private notion was that I was commissioned by the English Government to find out how Roquefort cheese was made, with a view to competition.  At length, as we talked freely, she let the state of her mind with regard to me escape her unawares by putting this question plump: 

‘How is it the gendarmes have not stopped you?’

‘That I cannot tell you,’ said I, much amused by her candour; ’but you may be sure of this, I am not afraid of them.’

Her husband was listening behind the door, and I observed an expression of relief in his face when I took up my pack and departed.  If I was to be pounced upon, he preferred, for his own peace of mind and the reputation of his house, that it should be done elsewhere.  All the village had heard of my coming, and when I reappeared outside there was a small crowd of people waiting to have a good look at me.  I thought from these signs that I was likely to be asked to show my papers again by some petty functionary; but no, I was allowed to pass on without interference.  Perhaps the postman had given a good account of me, the absinthe having touched his heart.  There is much diplomacy in getting somebody on your side while travelling alone through these unopened districts far from railways.  Wandering among the peasants of the Tarn and the Aveyron teaches one what ignorance really means, what blindness of intellect goes with it.  And yet their enlightenment by the usual methods would be a doubtful blessing to themselves and others.

I was now descending to the valley, and not long after leaving the village an attempt to escape from the winding hot road led me into one of those wildernesses which are to me infinitely more pleasing than the most artistic gardens, with their geometric flower-beds and their counterfeit lakes and grottoes.  The surface of the land was thrown or washed up into dark-brown hillocks of broken argillaceous schist, which repelled vegetation, but the hollows were wooded with mountain oak and many shrubs.  Farther down there were other hillocks, equally bare, but formed of the blue-looking lias marl which the husbandman detests with good reason, for its sterility is incorrigible.  This terre bleue, as the peasants call it, was not the only sign of a change in the formation; fragments of calcareous stone were mixed with the brown soil.  I was leaving the dark schist and was approaching those immense accumulations of jurassic rock, whose singular forms and brilliant colours lend such extraordinary grandeur