Perhaps he thought me an escaped madman, or a dangerous tramp, with whom it was better to hold no conversation.  The sun was setting when I reached a wood of scattered firs—­a more melancholy spot at that hour than the bare causse.  The weather had been fine for some hours, but now a storm that had been gathering broke.  As the wind blew the rain in slanting lines, the level sun shone through the vapour and the streaming atmosphere.  Looking above me, as I sheltered myself behind a wailing fir, I saw that the dreary world was spanned by two glorious rainbows.  But although the scene was so wildly beautiful, the spirit of desolation was upon me, and I felt like a homeless wanderer.  I was roaming among the firs in the dusk, when I met a shepherd boy, who put me on a path that joined the main road to Chanac.  Then began the descent into the valley of the Lot.  It was very long; the winding road passed through a black forest of firs, and the dark night fell when I was still far from the little town.  The walk was gloomy, but in all gloom there is something that is grand and elevating—­something that gives a sense of expansion to the soul.  The cries of the unseen night-birds, the solemn mystery of the enigmatic trees wrapped in darkness, make us feel the supernatural that surrounds us, and is a part of us, more than the visible movement of life in the light of the sun.

At length the oil-lamps of Chanac flashed brightly in the hollow below, and not long afterwards I was sitting at a table in an upper room of a comfortable old inn, the lower part of which was filled with roisterers, for it was Sunday night.  I dined with a Government functionary—­an inland revenue controleur, who happened to be a Frenchman of the reserved and solemn sort that cultivates dignity.  By dint of being looked up to by others he had acquired the fixed habit of looking up to himself.  All the time that I was in his company I felt that, had he been an angel dining with a modern Tobias, he could scarcely have shown greater anxiety not to sit upon his wings.  Moved by the genial spirit of the grape, or not wishing, perhaps, to crush me altogether with the weight of his official importance, his ice began to melt a little at about the second or third course.  Forgetting discretion, he actually smiled.  The meal, which had been prepared in anticipation of his coming, was a much more splendid entertainment than would have been got up for me had I been alone.  The cook’s masterpiece was a very cunningly contrived pasty—­a work of local genius that I was quite unprepared for.  Even M. le controleur, had he not checked himself in time, would have beamed at this achievement; but he would never have forgiven himself such an admission of weakness common to mortals not in the service of the Government.  Just before the dessert a superb trout that had been drawn out of the sparkling Lot was brought in, and it had been mercifully spared the disgrace of being sprinkled with chopped garlic.