The Fatal Facility, Of The French _Article_ Becomes At Last As Irritating As The Refrain Of A Popular Song.

The poor "Indiens Galibis" struck me as really more interesting, - a group of stunted savages who formed one of

The attractions of the place, and were confined in a pen in the open air, with a rabble of people pushing and squeezing, hanging over the barrier, to look at them. They had no grimace, no pretension to be new, no desire to catch your eye. They looked at their visitors no more than they looked at each other, and seemed ancient, indifferent, terribly bored.

XIX.

There is much entertainment in the journey through the wide, smiling garden of Gascony; I speak of it as I took it in going from Bordeaux to Toulouse. It is the south, quite the south, and had for the present narrator its full measure of the charm he is always determined to find in countries that may even by courtesy be said to appertain to the sun. It was, moreover, the happy and genial view of these mild latitudes, which, Heaven knows, often have a dreari- ness of their own; a land teeming with corn and wine, and speaking everywhere (that is, everywhere the phyl- loxera had not laid it waste) of wealth and plenty. The road runs constantly near the Garonne, touching now and then its slow, brown, rather sullen stream, a sullenness that encloses great dangers and disasters. The traces of the horrible floods of 1875 have dis- appeared, and the land smiles placidly enough while it waits for another immersion. Toulouse, at the period I speak of, was up to its middle (and in places above it) in water, and looks still as if it had been thoroughly soaked, - as if it had faded and shrivelled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charm- ing Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, bar- ring the straightness, and here and there occupies the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals - and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I hold the taste to be most legitimate - will delight in this admirable specimen of the class, which has a very in- teresting history, not to be narrated here. On the other side of the road (the left), all the way, runs a long, low line of hills, or rather one continuous hill, or perpetual cliff, with a straight top, in the shape of a ledge of rock, which might pass for a ruined wall. I am afraid the reader will lose patience with my habit of constantly referring to the landscape of Italy, as if that were the measure of the beauty of every other. Yet I am still more afraid that I cannot apologize for it, and must leave it in its culpable nakedness.

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