Oil, of the best quality, is twelve sous the pound, and sixteen sous if it be virgin oil.  This is what runs from the olive when put into the press, spontaneously; afterwards they are forced by the press and by hot water.  Dung costs ten sous the one hundred pounds.  Their fire-wood is chene-vert and willow.  The latter is lopped every three years.  An ass sells for from one to three louis; the best mules for thirty louis.  The best asses will carry two hundred pounds; the best horses three hundred pounds; the best mules six hundred pounds.  The temperature of the mineral waters of Aix is 90 deg. of Fahrenheit’s thermometer, at the spout.  A mule eats half as much as a horse.  The allowance to an ass for the day, is a handful of bran mixed with straw.  The price of mutton and beef, about six and a half sous the pound.  The beef comes from Auvergne, and is poor and bad.  The mutton is small, but of excellent flavor.  The wages of a laboring man are one hundred and fifty livres the year, a woman’s sixty to sixty-six livres, and fed.  Their bread is half wheat, half rye, made once in three or four weeks, to prevent too great a consumption.  In the morning they eat bread with an anchovy, or an onion.  Their dinner in the middle of the day is bread, soup, and vegetables.  Their supper the same.  With their vegetables, they have always oil and vinegar.  The oil costs about eight sous the pound.  They drink what is called piquette.  This is made after the grapes are pressed, by pouring hot water on the pumice.  On Sunday they have meat and wine.  Their wood for building comes mostly from the Alps, down the Durance and Rhone.  A stick of pine, fifty feet long, girting six feet and three inches at one end, and three feet three inches at the other, costs, delivered here, from fifty-four to sixty livres.  Sixty pounds of wheat cost seven livres.  One of their little asses will travel with his burthen about five or six leagues a day, and day by day; a mule from six to eight leagues.*

     * It is twenty American miles from Aix to Marseilles, and
     they call it five leagues.  Their league, then, is of four
     American miles.

March 29.  Marseilles.  The country is hilly, intersected by chains of hills and mountains of massive rock.  The soil is reddish, stony, and indifferent where best.  Wherever there is any soil, it is covered with olives.  Among these are corn, vines, some lucerne, mulberry, some almonds, and willow.  Neither enclosures, nor forest.  A very few sheep.

On the road I saw one of those little whirlwinds which we have in Virginia, also some gullied hill-sides.  The people are in separate establishments.  Ten morning observations of the thermometer, from the 20th to the 31st of March inclusive, made at Nismes, St. Remy, Aix, and Marseilles, give me an average of 52 1/2 deg., and 46 deg. and 61 deg., for the greatest and least morning heats.  Nine afternoon observations, yield an average of 62 2/3 deg., and 57 deg. and 66 deg., the greatest and least.  The longest day here, from sunrise to sunset, is fifteen hours and fourteen minutes; the shortest is eight hours and forty-six minutes; the latitude being ---------.