March 19 to 23.  LANGUEDOC. Pont-St.-Esprit.  Bagnols.  Connaux.  Valignitres.  Remoulins.  St. Gervasy.  Vismes.  Pont d’Aries. To Remoulins, there is a mixture of hill and dale.  Thence to Nismes, hills on the right, on the left, plains extending to the Rhone and the sea.  The hills are rocky.  Where there is soil, it is reddish and poor.  The -plains generally reddish and good, but stony.  When you approach the Rhone, going to Arles, the soil becomes a dark gray loam with some sand, and very good.  The culture is corn, clover, saintfoin, olives, vines, mulberries, willow, and some almonds.  There is no forest.  The hills are enclosed in dry stone-wall.  Many sheep.

From the summit of the first hill, after leaving Pont-St.-Esprit, there is a beautiful view of the bridge at about two miles’ distance, and a fine landscape of the country both ways.  From thence, an excellent road, judiciously conducted, through very romantic scenes.  In one part, descending the face of a hill, it is laid out in serpentine, and not zigzag, to ease the descent.  In others, it passes through a winding meadow, from fifty to one hundred yards wide, walled, as it were, on both sides, by hills of rock; and at length issues into plain country.  The waste hills are covered with thyme, box, and chene-vert.  Where the body of the mountains has a surface of soil, the summit has sometimes a crown of rock, as observed in Champagne.  At Nismes, the earth is full of lime-stone.  The horses are shorn.  They are now pruning the olive.  A very good tree produces sixty pounds of olives, which yield fifteen pounds of oil:  the best quality selling at twelve sous the pound, retail, and ten sous, wholesale.  The high hills of Languedoc still covered with snow.  The horse-chestnut and mulberry are leafing; apple trees and peas blossoming.  The first butterfly I have seen.  After the vernal equinox, they are often six or eight months without rain.  Many separate farm-houses, numbers of people in rags, and abundance of beggars.  The mine of wheat, weighing thirty pounds, costs four livres and ten sous.  Wheat bread, three sous the pound. Vin ordinaire, good, and of a strong body, two or three sous the bottle.  Oranges, one sous apiece.  They are nearly finishing at Nismes a great mill, worked by a steam-engine, which pumps water from a lower into an upper cistern, from whence two overshot wheels are supplied, each of which turns two pair of stones.  The upper cistern being once filled with water, it passes through the wheels into the lower one, from whence it is returned to the upper by the pumps.  A stream of water of one quarter or one half inch diameter, supplies the waste of evaporation, absorption, fee.  This is furnished from a well by a horse.  The arches of the Pont-St.-Esprit are of eighty-eight feet.  Wild figs, very flourishing, grow out of the joints of the Pont-du-Gard.  The fountain of Nismes is so deep, that a stone was thirteen seconds descending from the surface to the bottom.