beautiful colour was on the stems and leaves! Greens and yellows passed
into carmine, purple, and burnt sienna. A field of ripening buckwheat has a
charm of warm colour that gladdens the eye, especially when the morning or
evening sunshine is upon it. But this glow of many tints was a sure sign
of approaching autumn; so, too, were the reddened stalks of persicaria,
filling the dry ditches by the wayside.

The valley narrowed, and upon its rocky sides was many a patch of purple
heather--little gardens for the wild bees, but not for man. Neither peasant
nor local Nimrod ever sets his foot there. Still higher, the outlines of
the topmost crags were drawn hard against the sky, for there was no vapour
in the air. Verily, the ground seemed quite alive with brown lizards
darting along at my approach and raising little clouds of dust, whilst
blue-winged grasshoppers--which, perhaps, would be more correctly described
as locusts--crossed and recrossed the road in one flight. In the midst of
such beautiful scenery, and with such happy creatures for companions, I
felt no wish to hurry. Moreover, the blackberries sometimes tempted me to
loiter. If they are unwholesome, as French peasants often maintain, I
ought to have been dead long ago. Strange that this prejudice should be
so general in France with regard to the fruit of so harmless a tribe. But
these same peasants gather the leaves of the bramble to make a decoction
for sore throat. I passed a cottage that had a vine-trellis, the first I
had seen on this side of the Auvergne mountains, and it was half surrounded
by a forest of beans in full flower on very high sticks. In a sunny space
was a row of thatched beehives.

After walking some eight miles, I was not unwilling to take advantage of
a village inn. Here I had a meal of bacon and eggs, haricots, cheese and
walnuts, with some rather rough Limousin wine. I soon became aware that
there was something amiss in the rustic auberge, and catching a dim glimpse