back to Vers.  The nail could not be found, so I was obliged to leave without a souvenir of the Celtic city.  Not far from this spot I found another millstone that would have fitted the one I had left and made a complete mill.  They are doubtless still lying upon the dreary height of Murcens; but whether they are there or in a museum, they are as dumb as any other stones, although, had they the power to repeat some of the gossip of the women who once bent over them, they might tell us a good deal that Caesar left out of his Commentaries because he thought it unimportant, but which we should much like to know.

I did not return by the way I came, but kept upon the plateau, going southward, then, dropping down into another valley at the bottom of which ran a tributary of the Vers, I crossed the stream and rose upon the opposite hill, making somewhat at random towards the village of Cours.  On my way I started numerous coveys of red partridges from juniper and box and other low shrubs.  Had I been a sportsman carrying a gun I could have made a splendid ‘bag,’ but these chances generally fall to those who cannot profit by them.  I wondered, however, at the lack of poaching enterprise in a district so near to Cahors.  It is not often that one meets even in the least populous parts of France so many partridges in an absolutely wild state.  Immense flocks of larks were likewise feeding upon the moorland, and the beating of their countless wings as they rose made a mighty sound when it suddenly broke the silence of the hills.  I met a small peasant girl with a face as dark as a Moorish child’s, and eyes wonderfully large and lustrous.  She was a beautiful little creature of a far Southern or Arabian type.  At Cours I talked to a woman who was a pure type of the red-haired Celt.  How strange it is that with all the intermixture of blood in the course of many centuries the old racial characteristics return when they are deeply ingrained in a people!

I took shelter at Cours from a sharp storm.  It was a wretched little village upon a dreary height, and the inhabitants, to whom French was a foreign language, stared at me as if I had been a gorilla.  An overhanging ‘bush’ of juniper led me to a very small inn that bore the familiar signs of antiquity, dirt and poverty.  I knocked at the old oak door studded with nail-heads, and it presently creaked upon its rusty hinges.  It was opened by a poor woman whose manners were wofully uncouth; but this was no fault of hers.  She was honest, as such rough people generally are.  Although she must have wanted money, it did not occur to her to extract a sou from the stranger beyond the just price.  When I had had enough of her wine and bread and cheese, and asked her to tell me what I owed her, she carefully measured with her eye how much wine was left in the bottle, how much bread and cheese I had taken, and when her severe calculation was finished she replied, in a harsh, firm voice, which meant that the reckoning being made she intended to stand by it:  ‘Eleven sous.’