DAUPHINE.  From St. Fond to Mornant.  March 15, 16, 17, 18.  The Rhone makes extensive plains, which lie chiefly on the eastern side, and are often in two stages.  Those of Montelimart are three,or four miles wide, and rather good.  Sometimes, as in the neighborhood of Vienne, the hills come in precipices to the river, resembling then very much our Susquehanna and its hill, except that the Susquehanna is ten times as wide as the Rhone.  The highlands are often very level.  The soil both of hill and plain, where there is soil, is generally tinged, more or less, with red.  The hills are sometimes mere masses of rock, sometimes a mixture of loose stone and earth.  The plains are always stony, and as often as otherwise covered perfectly with a coat of round stones, of the size of the fist, so as to resemble the remains of inundations, from which all the soil has been carried away.  Sometimes they are middling good, sometimes barren.  In the neighborhood of Lyons there is more corn than wine.  Towards Tains more wine than corn.  From thence the plains, where best, are in corn, clover, almonds, mulberries, walnuts:  where there is still some earth, they are in corn, almonds, and oaks.  The hills are in vines.  There is a good deal of forest-wood near Lyons, but not much afterwards.  Scarcely any enclosures.  There are a few small sheep before we reach Tains; there the’number increases.

Nature never formed a country of more savage aspect, than that on both sides the Rhone.  A huge torrent rushes like an arrow between high precipices, often of massive rock, at other times of loose stone, with but little earth.  Yet has the hand of man subdued this savage scene, by planting corn where there is a little fertility, trees where there is still less, and vines where there is none.  On the whole, it assumes a romantic, picturesque, and pleasing air.  The hills on the opposite side of the river, being high, steep, and laid up in terraces, are of a singular appearance.  Where the hills are quite in waste, they are covered with broom, whins, box, and some clusters of small pines.  The high mountains of Dauphine and Languedoc are now covered with snow.  The almond is in general bloom, and the willow putting out its leaf.  There were formerly olives at Tain; but a great cold, some years ago, killed them, and they have not been replanted.  I am told at Montelimart, that an almond tree yields about three livres profit a year.  Supposing them three toises apart, there will be one hundred to the arpent, which gives three hundred livres a year, besides the corn growing on the same ground.  A league below Vienne, on the opposite side of the river, is Cote Rotie.  It is a string of broken hills, extending a league on the river, from the village of Ampuis to the town of Condrieu.  The soil is white, tinged a little, sometimes, with yellow, sometimes with red, stony, poor, and laid up in terraces.  Those parts of the hills only, which look to the sun at mid-day,