It was dusk, when we reached the village of Senas, tired with the day’s march.  A landlord, standing in his door, on the lookout for customers, invited us to enter, in a manner so polite and pressing, we could not choose but do so.  This is a universal custom with the country innkeepers.  In a little village which we passed towards evening, there was a tavern, with the sign:  “The Mother of Soldiers.”  A portly woman, whose face beamed with kindness and cheerfulness, stood in the door and invited us to stop there for the night.  “No, mother!” I answered; “we must go much further to-day.”  “Go, then,” said she, “with good luck, my children! a pleasant journey!” On entering the inn at Senas, two or three bronzed soldiers were sitting by the table.  My French vocabulary happening to give out in the middle of a consultation about eggs and onion-soup, one of them came to my assistance and addressed me in German.  He was from Fulda, in Hesse Cassel, and had served fifteen years in Africa.  Two other young soldiers, from the western border of Germany, came during the evening, and one of them being partly intoxicated, created such a tumult, that a quarrel arose, which ended in his being beaten and turned out of the house.

We met, every day, large numbers of recruits in companies of one or two hundred, on their way to Marseilles to embark for Algiers.  They were mostly youths, from sixteen to twenty years of age, and seemed little to forebode their probable fate.  In looking on their fresh, healthy faces and bounding forms, I saw also a dim and ghastly vision of bones whitening on the desert, of men perishing with heat and fever, or stricken down by the aim of the savage Bedouin.

Leaving next morning at day-break, we walked on before breakfast to Orgon, a little village in a corner of the cliffs which border the Durance, and crossed the muddy river by a suspension bridge a short distance below, to Cavaillon, where the country people were holding a great market.  From this place a road led across the meadow-land to L’Isle, six miles distant.  This little town is so named, because it is situated on an island formed by the crystal Sorgues, which flows from the fountains of Vaucluse.  It is a very picturesque and pretty place.  Great mill-wheels, turning slowly and constantly, stand at intervals in the stream, whose grassy banks are now as green as in spring-time.  We walked along the Sorgues, which is quite as beautiful and worthy to be sung as the Clitumnus, to the end of the village, to take the road to Vaucluse.  Beside its banks stands a dirty, modern “Hotel de Petrarque et Laure.”  Alas, that the names of the most romantic and impassioned lovers of all history should be desecrated to a sign-post to allure gormandizing tourists!