the sea.  This space is hilly, reddish, gravelly, and of middling quality, in olives, vines, corn, almonds, figs, and capers.  The capers are planted eight feet apart.  A bush yields, one year with another, two pounds, worth twelve sous the pound.  Every plant, then, yields twenty-four sous, equal to one shilling sterling.  An acre, containing six hundred and seventy-six plants, would yield thirty-three pounds sixteen shillings sterling.  The fruit is gathered by women, who can gather about twelve pounds a day.  They begin to gather about the last of June, and end about the middle of October.  Each plant must be picked every day.  These plants grow equally well in the best or worst soil, or even in the walls, where there is no soil.  They will last the life of a man, or longer.  The heat is so great at Toulon in summer, as to occasion very great cracks in the earth.  Where the caper is in a soil that will admit it, they plough it.  They have pease here through the winter, sheltering them occasionally; and they have had them ever since the 25th of March, without shelter.

April 6. Hieres.  This is a plain of two or three miles diameter, bounded by the sea on one side, and mountains of rock on the other.  The soil is reddish, gravelly, tolerably good, and well watered.  It is in olives, mulberries, vines, figs, corn, and some flax.  There are also some cherry trees.  From Hieres to the sea, which is two or three miles, is a grove of orange trees, olives, and mulberries.  The largest orange tree is of two feet diameter one way, and one foot the other (for the section of all the larger ones would be an oval, not a round), and about twenty feet high.  Such a tree will yield about six thousand oranges a year.  The garden of M. Fille has fifteen thousand six hundred orange, trees.  Some years they yield forty thousand livres, some only ten thousand; but generally about twenty-five thousand.  The trees are from eight to ten feet apart.  They are blossoming and bearing, all the year, flowers and fruit in every stage at the same time.  But the best fruit is that which is gathered in April and May.  Hieres is a village of about five thousand inhabitants, at the foot of a mountain, which covers it from the north, and from which extends a plain of two or three miles to the sea-shore.  It has no port.  Here are palm trees twenty or thirty feet high, but they bear no fruit.  There is also a botanical garden kept by the King.  Considerable salt-ponds here.  Hieres is six miles from the public road.  It is built on a narrow spur of the mountain.  The streets in every direction are steep, in steps of stairs, and about eight feet wide.  No carriage of any kind can enter it.  The wealthier inhabitants use chaises a porteurs.  But there are few wealthy, the bulk of the inhabitants being laborers of the earth.  At a league’s distance in the sea is an island, on which is the Chateau de Geans, belonging to the Marquis de Pontoives:  there is a causeway leading to it.  The cold of the last November killed the leaves of a great number of the orange-trees, and some of the trees themselves.