wine. I soon went outside to see something of the place which I had entered
in the darkness.

I found that the village was built partly in the bottom of the gorge and
partly on one of its craggy sides. Closely hemmed in by rocks and high
hills overgrown with forest was a bright and fertile little valley, with
abundance of pear and walnut trees, luxuriant cottage-gardens, and little
fields by the flashing torrent, where shocks of lately-cut buckwheat stood
with their heads together waiting for the warm September hours to ripen
their black grain.

Many of the houses were half hidden in leafy bowers. I threaded my way
between these towards some ivy-draped fragments of an ancient priory upon a
mass of rock much overgrown with brambles glistening with blackberries
and briars decked with coral-red hips. Before descending to the road and
beginning the day's journey I indulged for a little while the musing mood
of the solitary wanderer in the grassy burying-ground on the edge of the
cliff.

I started for Bort ere the intensely blue sky began to pale before the
increasing brilliancy of the sun. The road ran along the bottom of the deep
valley, where there was change of scene with every curve of the Dordogne. A
field of maize showed how different was the climate here from that of the
bleak plateau above the deep rift in the rocks. I stopped beside a little
runnel that came down from the wooded heights to pick some flowers of
yellow balsam, and while there my eye fell upon a splendid green lizard
basking in the sun. Here was another proof of the warm temperature of the
valley, notwithstanding its altitude. As I went on I skirted long fields of
buckwheat upon the slope, but reaching only a little way upwards. The white
waxen flowers had turned, or were turning, rusty; but what a variety of