of the saint having been set down by those who had carried them from Agen, a fountain of the purest water burst forth from the earth, and has continued to flow ever since.  I found the chapel—­a modern Gothic one, with a statue of St. Foy in Roman dress in the niche over the door—­under a high rugged rock of schist.  There was no one but myself to trouble the solitude of this quiet nook on the wild hillside, all broken up into little gullies and ravines, where the aged chestnuts sheltered the tender moss and fern from the eager sunbeam, and kept the dew upon the bracken until the noonday hours.  An exquisitely delicate campanula with minute flowers bloomed with hemp-agrimony and wood-sage along the sides of the rills that -scarcely murmured as they slid down the clefts of the impervious rock.

As I went higher, the chestnuts became more scattered, and at length the rough land was covered only by the tufted heather and broom.  Here, instead of the light whispering of leaves, was the drowsy song of multitudinous bees.  The breeze blew freshly on the plateau, and grew stronger as the sun rose.  Could it be a cemetery, that grouping of stones that I saw upon the moorland?  No; it was a cottage-garden, surrounded by disconnected slabs of mica-schist, standing like little menhirs. peasant family lived in the wretched dwelling, exposed to the full force of the howling winds, and striving continually with nature for their black bread and the vegetables that give flavour to the watery soup.

A young man with a beret on his head overtook me.  He was a Bearnais, who had not been long in the district, and who earned his living by certain services that he rendered at widely-scattered farms.  He had to walk a great deal in all winds and weathers; therefore he knew the country well, and could give me useful information.  I was crossing the hills with the intention of meeting the Lot again in the great coal basin of the Aveyron, and thus cutting off a wide bend of the river.  All went well for some time after the Bearnais left me; but at length I became fairly bewildered by the woods and ravines, the hills and valleys that lay before me in seemingly endless succession.  Savage rockiness, sylvan quietude, open solitudes, bare and windblown, gave me all the sensations of nature which expand the soul; but the body grumbled for rest and refreshment long before I had crossed this singularly wild tract of country almost abandoned by man.  I had been wading through bracken up to my neck, or wandering almost at hazard through chestnut-woods for an hour or two, when hope was revived by my meeting a peasant, who told me that I was not far from the village of Firmi.  I left the great woods, and reached a district that was new in every sense.  Entering a little gorge, to me it seemed that nature had been cursed there ages ago, and still carried the sign of the malediction in the sooty darkness of the rocks—­jagged, tormented, baleful—­that rose on either