On the road to Villefranche, about half a mile from Ambialet, is a mine which has been abandoned from time immemorial, and which the inhabitants say was worked by the English for gold.  I have noticed, however, throughout this part of France, that nearly everything that was done in a remote age, whether good or evil, is attributed by the people to the English, and that they not infrequently make a curious confusion between Britons and Romans.  As for the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Arabs, all traditions respecting them appear to have passed out of the popular mind.  In the side of a stony hill on which scarcely a plant grows, a narrow passage, a few feet wide, has been quarried, and air shafts have been cut down into it through the solid rock with prodigious labour.  I followed this passage until a falling in of the roof prevented me from going any farther.  I could perceive no trace of a metallic vein, so thoroughly had it been worked out, but scattered over the hillside with schist, talcose slate, and fragments of quartz, was a great deal of scoriae, showing that metal of some kind had been excavated, and that the smelting had been done on the spot.  That the mine was worked for gold seems quite probable, inasmuch as a lump of mineral containing a considerable quantity of the precious metal was picked up near the entrance some years ago.  Besides the scoriae, I found upon the hillside much broken pottery, and from the shape of several fragments it was easy to restore the form of earthenware pots which were probably used for smelting purposes.  There is no record to show who the people were who were so busy upon these rocks glittering with mica and talc.  They may have belonged to any one of the races who passed over the land from the time of the Romans.

One morning, still in the month of July, I broke away from the charms of Ambialet, and shouldering again my old knapsack—­which, by travelling hundreds of miles in all weathers, had become disgracefully shabby, but which was a friend too well stitched together to be thrown aside on account of ill-looks—­I continued my journey up the valley of the Tarn.  I had agreed to walk with the parish priest as far as the village of Villeneuve, and having found him at the presbytery, we passed through the churchyard on the edge of the rock.  Here there is a remarkable cross, with the figure of Christ on one side and that of the Virgin on the other, not carved in relief, but in that early mediaeval style which consisted of hollowing out the stone around the image.  The cure frankly declared that, if anyone offered him a large new cross in the place of this little one, he would be glad to make the exchange.  It is unfortunate that so many rural priests place but little value upon religious antiquities other than images and relics which have a legend.  Their appreciation of ecclesiastical art is too often regulated by the practical and utilitarian order of ideas.  To dazzle the eye of the peasant may, and does, become the single aim of church ornamentation.  Hence the brassy, vulgar altars, and those coloured plaster images of modern manufacture that one sees with regret in so many of the country churches of France.