Lean tortoiseshell cats, with staring eyes and tails like strings, kept near at hand, and seemed ready to commit any crime for the smallest particle of goose.  String-tailed, goggle-eyed, meagre cats that seize your dinner if you do not keep watch over it, and when caressed promptly respond by scratching and swearing, appear to be held in high favour throughout this district.  They are expected to live upon rats, and it is this that makes them so disagreeable, for although they kill rats for the pleasure of the chase, they do not like the flavour of them.  On this subject there is a standing quarrel between them and society, which insists upon their eating the animals that they kill.  In order that the cats shall have every facility for the chase, holes are often cut in the bottom of house-doors, so that at night they may go in and come out as the quarry moves them.  Should any food have been left about, what with the rats and the cats, not a trace of it will be seen in the morning.  This I know from experience.

Being within a mile or so of the Puit de Padirac—­that gloomy hole in the earth which was supposed to be one of the devil’s short-cuts between this world and his own, until M. Martel proved almost conclusively that it was not the way to the infernal city, but to a subterranean river, and a chain of lakes that could be followed for two miles—­I set out the next morning to find it.  I might have spent hours in vain casting about, but for the help of a peasant, who offered, quite disinterestedly, to be my guide.  He was an old man, with a very Irish face, and eyes that laughed at life.  But for his language he would have seemed a perfectly natural growth of Cork or Kerry.

Here may be the place to remark that the stock of the ancient Cadurci appears to have been much less impaired here in an ethnological sense by the mingling of races than in the country round Cahors.  The peasants, generally, have nothing distinctively Southern in their appearance, although they speak a dialect which is in the main a Latin one, the Celtic words that have been retained being in a very small proportion.  Gray or blue eyes are almost as frequent among them as they are with the English, and many of the village children have hair the colour of ripening maize.

We left the fertile valley and rose upon the stone-scattered causse where hellebore, spurges, and juniper were the only plants not cropped close to the earth by the flocks of sheep which thrive upon these wastes.  All the sheep are belled, but the bells they wear are like big iron pots hanging upon their breasts.  Each pot has a bone that swings inside of it and serves as a hammer.  The chief use of these bells is to prevent the animal from leaving its best wool, that of the breast, upon the thorns of bushes.