to the scenery of the Upper Tarn.  There was also a change in the vegetation.  A large species of broom, four or five feet high, covered with golden blossom the size of pea-flowers, although the common broom had long passed its blooming, now showed itself as well as roseroot sedum, neither of which had I seen while coming over the schist.  The cicadas returned and screamed from every tree.  I captured one and examined the musical instrument—­a truly marvellous bit of mechanism—­that it carried in each of its sides.  It is not legs which make the noise, as is the case with crickets and grasshoppers, but little hard membranes under the wings are scraped together at the creature’s will.  The sound is not musical, for when it is not a continuous scissor-grinding noise, it is like the cry of a corncrake with a weak throat; but what delight there is in it! and how it expresses that joy in the present and recklessness of the morrow, which the fabulist has in vain contrasted with the virtuous industry of the ant in order to point a moral for mankind!—­vainly, because the cigale’s short life in the sunlit trees will ever seem to men a more ideal one than that of the earth-burrowing ant, with its possible longevity, its peevish parsimony, and restless anxiety for the future.  I could have lain down under a tree like a gipsy in this wild spot, and let the summer dreams come to me from their airy castles amongst the leaves, if I had not made up my mind to reach St. Affrique before night.  There was another reason which, although it clashes with poetry, had better be told for the sake of truth.  Insects would soon have taken all pleasure from the siesta.  Great black ants, and great red ones, little ants too, that could have walked with comfort through the eye of a fine needle, notwithstanding their wickedness, and intermediate species of the same much-praised family, would have scampered over me and stung me, and flies of bad propensities would have settled upon me.  An enthusiastic entomologist has only to lie down in the open air in this part of France at the end of July or in August, and he will soon be able to observe, perhaps feel, sufficient insects travelling on their legs or on the wing to satisfy a great deal of curiosity.  Often the air is all aflutter with butterflies, many of them remarkable for their size or the beauty of their colouring.  One I have particularly noticed; not large, but coloured with exquisite gradations of bright-yellow, orange, and pale-green.

I believe I added to my day’s journey by my excursion across country, but the time would have passed less pleasantly on the road.  The winding yellow line, however, appeared again, and I had to tramp upon it.  And a hot, toilsome trudge it was, through that long narrow valley with scrubby woods reaching down to the road, but with no habitations and no water.  It was the desert.  The afternoon was far advanced when the country opened and I saw a village of coquettish appearance, for most of the houses had been washed with red, and many of the window-shutters were painted green.