the farandole all through the house.  If any door has been left open, it worries you more by its banging at intervals of a minute than if it went on without stopping to consider.  Therefore you are compelled to rise again, and go and look for it—­anything but a cheerful expedition if you cannot find the matches.  When this south wind falls, the rain generally comes, bringing great refreshment to the parched earth, and all the animals that live upon it.

As I have referred to the house in which I live, I may as well say something more with regard to it and the things which it contains.  It is not one of the ancient houses of Figeac, but it is old-fashioned and provincial.  The rooms are rather large, the floors are venerably black, and the boarded ceilings supported by rafters have never had their structural secrets or the grain of the timber concealed by a layer of plaster.  What you see over-head is simply the floor of the room or the loft above.  And yet this is not considered a poor-kind of house; it is as good as most good people hereabouts live in.  The furniture is simple, but solid; it was made to last, and most of it has long outlasted the first owners.  In every room, the kitchen excepted, there is a bed, according to the very general custom of the country.  The character of the people is distinctly utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours.  There is even a bed in the salle a manger.  A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze.  It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary conversation.  A clock, therefore, could not make itself heard by such people as these Quercynois, unless it had a voice matching in some sort with their own.  Another piece of furniture that pleases me, because it is of shining copper, which always throws a homely warmth into a room, is a large basin fixed upon a stand against the wall, with a little cistern above it, also of copper.  It is intended for washing the hands by means of a fillet of water that is set running by turning the tap.  In this dry part of the world water has to be used sparingly, and, indeed, there is very little wasted upon the body.  Everybody who has travelled in Guyenne must be familiar with the article of household furniture just described.  Every young wife piously provides herself with one, together with a warming-pan; for the old domestic ideas are religiously handed down here from mother to daughter.  But I must shorten this ‘journey round my room,’ so little in the manner of Le Maistre.

Most of the furniture was once the property of a priest, and would be still if he were alive.  The good man is gone where even the voices of the Figeacois cannot reach him; but he has left abundant traces of his piety behind him.  The walls of these rooms are almost covered by them.  I cannot help being edified, for I am unable to look upon anything that approaches the profane.