fosters its orchestra and has its public music-stand in the square or in the Volksgarten.  In Bordeaux, workmen and mechanics, small urchins and sailors from the quays, fringed the more aristocratic circle of chairs, and listened as intently and as seriously as a Thomas audience at home.  It cannot but have a humanizing effect.  These listeners below us,—­and so with the rough populace of Bordeaux,—­have become tranquilized, soothed, softened; the buzz of harsh or random talk dies down; all faces are turned for the time to the common centre, all thoughts mingle in a common stillness of enjoyment.

CHAPTER XI.

OVER THE HIGHWAY OF THE HOT SPRINGS.

“Like a silver zone,
Flung about carelessly, it shines afar;

* * * * *

“Yet through its fairy course, go where it will,
The torrent stops it not, the rugged rock
Opens and lets it in; and on it runs,
Winning its easy way from clime to clime.”

—­ROGERS’ Italy.

It is Monday morning at Eaux Bonnes.  The dome of the sky is of unspecked blue.  The departing diligence for Laruns has just rolled away down the road, and now a landau with four horses, and a victoria with two, stand before the Hotel des Princes.  A formal contract, wisely yet ludicrously minute in detail, bristling with discomforting provisos for contingencies, and copied out in the usual painstaking French handwriting, has been discussed and gravely signed.  We are to be conveyed to Cauterets as the first day’s stage, and thereafter to have the carriages at command, for an agreed price per day, if we wish to retain them.  Thus we can journey on to Luz, Gavarnie, Bareges, Bigorre and even Luchon.  The memorandum is handed us; it provides for delays and breakdowns, disputes, damages, sickness; it stipulates for return prices from the place of dismissal.  The average price for two such conveyances in this region, “keep” included but not pourboire, will be found to hold within from seventy-five to ninety francs a day,—­thirty-five to forty-five francs for each carriage; I record it as matter of information for possible comers.  The carriages, the horses and the drivers are all strong and all well-cushioned, and the drivers are resplendently tinseled besides.

We are now to enter oft the Route Thermale.  This carriage-road is one of the marvels of modern engineering.  The chief resorts in the French Pyrenees are imbedded each at the head of a north-and-south valley running up from the plain against the crest of the range.  Between them, the huge mountain ridges, like ribs from a Typhon’s spine, stretch down in irregular parallels from the backbone of the chain.  Before this road was built, these resorts could only be visited successively by a tedious double journey in and out of each separate valley, or by high foot-paths over the ridges between.  Thus the traveling from one to another had its serious drawbacks.  The railroad came, skirting the plain, though not yet provided with the offshoots which now run partway up into the valleys; but even by rail the detours needed would be circuitous and wasting, and they missed utterly the out-of-door fascinations of true mountain travel.  Something yet was called for.