the hopper.  When fermented, it makes a red muscat, taking the tinge from the dissolution of the skin of the grape, which injures the quality.  When a red muscat is required, they prefer coloring it with a little Alicant wine.  But the white is best.  The piece of two hundred and forty bottles, after being properly drawn off from its lees, and ready for bottling, costs from one hundred and twenty to two hundred livres, the first, quality and last vintage.  It cannot be bought old, the demand being sufficient to take it all the first year.  There are not more than from fifty to one hundred pieces a year, made of this first quality.  A setterie yields about one piece, and my informer supposes there are about two setteries in an arpent.  Portage to Paris, by land, is fifteen livres the quintal.  The best recoltes are those of M. Bouquet and M. Tremoulet.  The vines are in rows four feet apart, every way.

May 11. Montpelier.  Snow on the Cevennes, still visible from here.  With respect to the muscat grape, of which the wine is made, there are two kinds, the red and the white.  The first has a red skin, but a white juice.  If it be fermented in the cuve, the coloring matter which resides in the skin, is imparted to the wine.  If not fermented in the cuve, the wine is white.  Of the white grape, only a white wine can be made.  The species of saintfoin cultivated here by the name of sparsette, is the hedysarum onobrychis.  They cultivate a great deal of madder (garance) rubia tinctorum here, which is said to be immensely profitable.  Monsieur de Gouan tells me, that the pine, of which they use the burs for fuel, is the pinus sativus, being two-leaved.  They use-for an edging to the borders of their gardens, the santolina, which they call garderobe.  I find the yellow clover here, in a garden, and the large pigeon succeeding well, confined in a house.

May 12. Frontignan.  Some tolerably good plains in olives, vines, corn, saintfoin, and lucerne.  A great proportion of the hills are waste.  There are some enclosures of stone, and some sheep.  The first four years of madder are unproductive; the fifth and sixth yield the whole value of the land.  Then it must be renewed.  The sparsette is the common or true saintfoin.  It lasts about five years:  in the best land it is cut twice, in May and September, and yields three thousand pounds of dry hay to the setterie, the first cutting, and five hundred pounds, the second.  The setterie is of seventy-five dextres en tout sens, supposed about two arpents.  Lucerne is the best of all forage; it is sowed herein the broad-cast, and lasts about twelve or fourteen years.  It is cut four times a year, and yields six thousand pounds of dry hay, at the four cuttings, to the setterie.  The territory in which the vin muscat de Frontignan is made, is about a league of three thousand toises