else, and this one knew it.  The sacerdotal domestic help must be fifty years old when she enters the presbytery.  Spinster or widow, she has that inherent purpose of every woman to be, if she can, the mistress of the house in which she lives.  If she encounters no other woman in the field, against whom if she tried conclusions she would be broken like the earthen pot in the fable, she generally succeeds in achieving her ambition, although she may be in name a servant.  There are such phenomena as hen-pecked priests, and those who peck them have no right whatever to do it.  It is a state of things brought about by too much submission, for the sake of peace, to a mind determined to be uppermost while pretending to be humble.

When we left again for Villeneuve, we were three in number, and the old cure trudged along over the rocky or sandy paths as nimbly as either of his companions.  He pointed out to me a spot in the Tarn where he said was a gulf the bottom of which had never been sounded.  There are many such holes in the bed of this river, which receives much of its water from underground tributaries.

I was looking at the mournful vine-terraces, now mostly abandoned and grass-grown.  ‘Ah!’ said the octogenarian, shaking his head, and for once wearing a melancholy expression, ’the best wine of the South used to be grown there.’  Near a village a very tall pole, probably a young poplar that had been barked, had been raised in a garden, and painted with stripes of red, white, and blue.  It was described to me as a ‘tree of liberty,’ and I was told that the garden in which it was placed belonged to the mayor for the current year.  Every fresh mayor had a fresh tree.

At the village of Villeneuve I parted from my companions, who went to lunch with the cure, together with several other ecclesiastics.  These occasional meetings and junketings at one another’s houses are the chief mundane consolation of the rural priests, who are as weak as other mortals in the presence of a savoury dish, and, when they can afford to do so, they enter into the pleasures of hospitality with Horatian zest.  Poor as they often are, they generally know the faggot that conceals a drop of old wine to place before the guest.  The people in the South believe that the bounty of the Creator was intended to be made the most of, and the type of priest that one meets most frequently there in the richer parishes thinks that the next good thing to a clear conscience is a good table.

I lunched at the auberge, and I had for my companion a ruby-faced cattle-dealer of about fifty.  He spent his life chiefly in a trap, followed by an old cattle-dog of formidable build and determined expression of mouth.  This animal was now lying down near the table, so tired and footsore from almost perpetual running that he thought it too much trouble to get up and eat.  I read in his eye that he was in the habit of breathing every day of his life a canine curse on the business of cattle-dealing.  His master seemed a good-natured man, but he had a fixed idea that was unfortunate for the dog.  He considered that the beast ought to be able to run from thirty-five to forty miles a day, and that if he got sore paws it was his own fault.