By the aid of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he had got into a little creek where he was safe from the stormy seas of life, and he had never allowed his ambition to draw him out into the ocean.  Nevertheless, he nursed and rocked his little vanity like the rest of mortals.  He had written what he termed a ‘Monograph of Corn.’  He brought out from his desk a copybook wherein he had set it all down with the utmost attention to upstrokes and downstrokes and punctuation.  It was a pleasure to him to find somebody to whom he could read what he had written, and he had in me an attentive listener.

Wandering on by the winding Cele, the charm of the little river made me sit down upon a bank to look at the pictures that were painted on the water by the sunshine, the clouds, and the poplars.  Then, continuing my journey, I saw on the opposite side of the stream a cluster of houses with an ancient church in their midst, and almost detached from this church, and yet a part of it, a tower like a campanile capped by a wooden belfry with pointed roof and far-reaching eaves.  A bridge led across the water.  I found the village to be Sainte Eulalie d’Espagnac.  Here there existed from the early Middle Ages a celebrated convent for women of the order of St. Augustine.  The founder, Aymeric d’Hebrard, was the Bishop of a see in Spain, and he brought thence Moorish slaves to cultivate the land with which he had endowed his community of a hundred nuns.  Down to the Revolution most of the daughters of the nobility in the Quercy were educated here.  Little is now left of the conventual building; but the church contains architectural details of much interest, and the tombs of those irreconcilable enemies of the English, Bertrand de Cardaillac, Bishop of Cahors, and the Marquis de Cardaillac—­the most famous warrior of this bellicose and illustrious family.

Having reached the village of Brengues, I went immediately in search of the English rock-fortress of which I had already heard.  A path led me up the steep hillside to the foot of a long line of high rocks of yellowish limestone, so escarped and so forbidding to vegetable life that I did not see even a wild fig-tree hanging from a crevice.  A path ran along at the base of this prodigious wall, from the top of which stretched the arid causse.  I had only gone a little way when I saw before me a fortified Gothic gateway jutting out from the rock to which it was attached, and extending across the path to where the hill became so steep as to sufficiently protect from assault on that side those who had a motive for defending the ledge under the high cliff.  I examined this old piece of masonry with much curiosity.