Viandes.  Vins.

Du seret.  Du lait de vache.[68]

Du caille.  Du lait froid.

Du beurre.  Du lait de chevre.

Du fromage gras.  Petit lait.

Du fromage mi-gras.  De la creme.

Du fromage maigre.  Du lait de beurre.[69]

Tome de vache.  Petit lait de chevre.

Tome de chevre.

Pour les Cochons.

Du lait gate.

Cuite.

Some of the solids and fluids in the earlier part of this carte we felt tolerably sure of finding at the maire’s chalet, and accordingly any amount of cream and seret proved to be forthcoming.  The maire asserted that cerac was the true name of this recommendable article of food, cere being the patois for the original word.  Others had told us that the real word was serre, meaning compressed curds; but the French writers who treat learnedly of cheese-making in the Annales de Chimie adopt the form serets; and in the Annales Scientifiques de l’Auvergne I find both seret and serai, from the Latin serum.  There was also bread, which arrived when we were sitting down to our meal:  it had been baked in a huge ring, for convenience of carriage, and was brought up from the low-lands on a stick across a boy’s shoulder.  When the old woman thought it safe to expose a greater dainty to our attacks, at a later period of the meal, she brought out a pot of caille, a delightful luxury which prevails in the form of nuggets of various size floating in sour whey.  Owing to a general want of table apparatus, we placed the pot of caille on a broken wall, and speared the nuggets with our pocket-knives.

After the meal, the two Frenchmen found themselves wet and exceedingly cold; for Frenchmen have not yet learned the blessing of flannel shirts under a broiling sun.  They set to work to dry themselves after an original fashion.  The fire was little more than a collection of smouldering embers, confined within three stone walls about a foot high; so they took each a one-legged stool—­chaises des vaches, or chaise des montagnes—­and attached themselves to the stools by the usual leathern bands round the hips; then they cautiously planted the prods of the stools in the middle of the embers, maintaining an unstable equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls.  Here they sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm.  Of course, in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone sprawling into the fire.  A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he had reached with great difficulty