than the wives of the peasants; but low morality, instead of the sad but always honourable stamp of ravaging toil, was impressed on many a female face.  Even the children looked as degraded by the social atmosphere as they were blackened by the smoke and ever-falling soot.  Hastening along the road towards Aubin, I soon found that the two places, separated according to the map by a considerable distance, had grown together.  The long road powdered with coal-dust was now a street lined on each side with houses and hovels.  Wooden shanties with sooty, bushes of juniper hanging over the door, and the word ‘Buvette’ painted beneath, competed for the miner’s money at distances of twenty or fifty yards.  One had a notice such as is rarely seen in France, and which was significant here:  ’Ready money for everything sold over the counter.’  Close by was the sign of a sage-femme, who, under the picture of a woman holding aloft in triumph an unreasonably fat baby, announced that she also bled and vaccinated.  Grimy children and grimy pigs that were intended to be white or pink sprawled upon the thresholds or wallowed in the hot dust.

Having left the blissful coal basin, I met the Lot again near the boundary-line of the Aveyron and entered the department named after the river.  Thence to Capdenac the valley was a curving line of uninterrupted but ever-changing beauty.

The season was farther advanced when I continued the journey from this point to Cahors.

A person who had contracted the ‘morphia habit’ would probably find the most effectual cure for it by forced residence at Capdenac, because the town does not boast the luxury of a chemist’s shop.  Supposing the patient, however, to be a lady of worldly tastes, she might die of ennui in twenty-four hours.  The Capdenac of which I am speaking is not the utterly unpicturesque collection of houses that has been formed about the well-known railway junction on the line to Toulouse, but old romantic Capdenac, whose dilapidated ramparts, dating from the early Middle Ages, crown the high rocky hill that rises abruptly from the valley on the other side of the Lot, which here separates the department named after it from, the Aveyron.  The situation of this town is one of the most remarkable.  It is perched upon a lofty table of reddish rock of the same calcareous composition as that which prevails throughout the region of the causses.  Its walls are so escarped that the topmost crags in places overhang the path that winds about their base far below.  Only strategical considerations could ever have induced men to build a town on such a site.  The Gauls set the example, and their oppidum was long supposed to have been Uxellodunum, but the controversy has been settled in favour of the Puy d’Issolu.

I chose the hour of eight in the morning for climbing the rock of Capdenac.  The broad winding river was brilliantly blue, like the vault overhead, and although the vine-clad hills, which shut in the valley, and the bare rocks, whose outlines were sharply drawn against the sky, were luminous, the light had the pure and clear sparkle of the morning.  Reaching the hill, I took a zigzag stony path that led through terraced vineyards.  The vintage had commenced, and men, women, and children were busy picking the purple grapes still wet with dew.