seize the beholder.  As gay as any of the cicadas that keep the summer’s jubilee in the sunny tree-tops, he sings songs that have nothing in common with psalms, and he needs little provocation to dance.  French has become an awkward language to him, but his tongue is nimble enough both in Languedocian and Latin.  When he hears that the evening soup is ready, he hurries the pig home, flourishes his stick above his head in imitation of the Arabs, and shouts in his cheeriest voice, ‘Oportet manducare!’

The other uncle’s chief business is to look after a couple of cows, and as the farm has no pasturage but the orchard, he is away with them the greater part of the day along the banks of the Tarn.  One evening I met him by the river, and he stopped me to quote a passage from the Georgics which he had recalled to mind.  His face beamed with satisfaction.  I knew that he had not been brought up to cow-tending, but was, nevertheless, taken aback when the unfortunate old bachelor wished me to share the pleasure he felt in having brought to mind a long-forgotten passage of Virgil.  The surprises of real life never cease to be startling.  Speaking to me afterwards of the growing extravagance of all classes, he said: 

’When I was young there were only two cafes in Albi, and none but the rich ever entered them.  Now every man goes to his cafe.  I remember when, in middle-class families in easy circumstances, coffee was only drunk two or three times a year, on festive occasions.’  Very different is the state of things now in France.

The figure of the old man bending upon his stick glides away by the dark willow-fringe of the Tarn, and I am standing alone in the solemn splendour of the luminous dusk—­the clear-obscure of the quickly passing twilight, beside the bearded corn, whose gold is blended with the faint rosiness that spreads through the air of the valley, and lets free the fragrance of those flowers which keep all their sweetness for the evening.  There is still a gleam of the lost sun upon the priory walls, and over the dark rocks and wooded hollows floats a purple haze.  The dusk gathers apace, and the poplars that rise far above the willows along the river, their outlines shaded away into the black forest behind them, stand motionless like phantom trees, for not a leaf stirs; but the corn seems to grow more luminous, as if it had drunk something of the fire as well as the colour of the sun, while the horns of the sinking moon gleam silver-bright just over the topmost trees, painted in sepia upon a cobalt sky.  How weird, phantasmal, enigmatic the forms of those trees now appear!  Some like hell-hags, with wild hair flying, are rushing through the air; others, majestic, solitary, wrapped about with dark horror, are the trees of Fate; some have their arms raised in the frenzy of a torturing passion; others look like emblems of Care when hope and passion are alike dead:  each touches the spring of a sombre thought or a fantastic fancy.