“A bare strand
  Of hillocks heaped with ever-shifting sand,
  Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
  Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds.”

Its inhabitants are meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and drink.  Its miserliness is deep-set:  artesian wells sunk a thousand feet through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a precarious rye and barley grow grudgingly.

The low stretches of furze and heath and fern are fringed only by mournful horizons of pines or broken by long files of gashed and wounded firs.  This extensive tree-growth, however, which is comparatively recent, has at least lessened one terror of the Landes:  sand-storms and snow-storms, which once swept across the wastes, have been shorn of their strength.  Honor for this is due almost alone to one man, a M. Bremontier.  Before his time, forest-making had here been deemed impossible; pine seeds planted in the lax hold of these sands had hitherto been unable even to take root, against the unbroken sweep of the winds.  M. Bremontier, after many experiments, conceived the idea of planting with the pine seeds the seeds of the common broom, whose hardy tuft should protect the tiny sapling until it could stand by itself.  The result surpassed hope; pine forests, protecting in their turn, have sprung up and endured throughout the Landes; they have broken forever the power of the wind-storms; and their pitch and timber are even a source of some riches to the Department.

Still it remains a region unsmiling and melancholy.  A monochrome of sand, darkened everywhere by long blotches of sickly undergrowth or the dull reach of the pines; here and there are cork-trees and alders.  The sheen of some slow lagoon is caught in the distance.  There is a charm in the very charmlessness of the scene, as in some sombre-toned etching.

One striking specialty this district has, however; and from the train windows we watch closely for a specimen.  This is the shepherd on stilts, the Xicanque, immortalized by Rosa Bonheur and mentioned by many travelers.  He is peculiar to this region; perched on these wooden supports, at a perilous height above the ground, he stalks gravely over the landscape, enabled to behold a horizon of triple range and to outstride the fleetest of his vagrant flock.  When so inclined, he is quite able, it is said, to skillfully execute a pas seul or even a jig,—­with every appropriate flourish of his timber limbs and with surprising grace and abandon.  His stilts are strapped to the thigh, not the knee, for greater freedom, and he mounts from his cabin-roof in the early morning and lives in the air throughout the day.  A third stilt forms a seat, and makes of his silhouette a ludicrous and majestic tripod.  This genius’s chief amusement is startlingly domestic:  it is knitting stockings; and engaged in this peaceful art he sits with dignity and whiles away the hours.  How he manoeuvres when he accidentally drops a needle, I have not been able to learn.