This was Estaing.  It is a little place full of originality, and looks as if it had been built to set forth the dream of some old writer of romance.  The late-Gothic church is more quaint and odd than beautiful.  The architect sported with the laws of symmetry, and revelled in the fanciful.  The nave is much wider at one end than the other.  The great sundial over the door, bearing the date 1636, is scarcely less useful now than when it was placed there.  The castle is a strange pile, all the more picturesque by its incongruity.  It stands upon a mass of schistous rock about fifty feet above the river.  Most of the visible portion of the building is late Gothic and Renaissance; but this was grafted upon the lower walls and arches of a feudal fortress.  Towers rise from towers, mullioned windows have their lines cut in the shadow of beetling machicolations, and higher still are dormer windows with graceful Gothic gables.  This castle is now a convent and village school.  From the court I could see the Sisters’ little garden, where flowers and melons and potherbs were curiously mixed without the gardener’s systematic art, which is so often a deadly thing to beauty; and nasturtiums climbing the weedy walls from rough deal boxes were basking in the steady glow of afternoon sun, which seemed to me so intensely brilliant because I was in the dark shadow.  A Sister consented to let me go to the top of the highest tower, and she went before me rattling her keys officially.  On the way she showed me a fine Renaissance chimney-piece with florid carvings.

After Estaing the valley became wilder, and the river fell over rocks in a series of cascades.  Clouds came up and hid the sun; a rainy wind made the willows hoary, and set all the poplar leaves sighing and quivering.  The vines had disappeared, and the wooded gorge became very solemn in the fading light.  There was one figure in the landscape—­that of a peasant woman bending and rolling up into bundles the hemp that had been spread out to dry.  It added the human touch of melancholy to the sadness of the picture.  More and more gloomy became the scene.  Great black precipitous rocks of schist, their hollows filled with sombre foliage, rose in solemn grandeur far above me, and in the bottom the plunging stream foamed and roared.  The mad wind caught up the dust from the road and whirled it onward, and then the rain began to fall.  Rockier and darker became the way, and louder the roar of the stream.  So narrow was the gorge at length that the road ran along a ledge that had been cut in the gneiss.

When I was still some miles from Entraygues (called by the peasants Entrayou), I met a young gendarme.  He did not ask me for my papers, for he was a native of the district of Lourdes, and had been brought into contact with so many English people at Pau that he detected at once my Britannic accent, which has not been worn away by many years’ residence in France.  To him the fact of my being an Englishman was a sufficient