I DO not know why it was, but no sooner had we gone from Vienne by the road to the right, than we distrusted the directions of the tricycler we had met the night before. We asked our way of every peasant we saw. Many stared for answer. Therefore, when others, in a vile patois, declared the road we were on would take us to Chatonnay and Rives, but that it would be shorter to turn back and start from the other end of Vienne, we foolishly set this advice down to the score of stupidity, and rode on.—But, indeed, in no part of France through which we had ridden were the people so ill-natured and stolid. They are certainly the Alpine-bearish Burgundians Ruskin calls them.—In the valley on the other side of the hills we came to a place where four roads met. A woman watched one cow close by.—Would she tell us which road we must follow? asked J—— politely.—She never even raised her head. He shouted and shouted, but it was not until he began to call her names, after the French fashion, that she looked at us.—We could take whichever we wanted, she answered, and with that she walked away with her cow.

Fortunately there was a little village two or three kilometres farther on. A few well-dressed women and children were going to church, for it was Sunday. But the men of the commune stood around a cafÉ door. They assured us, we were on the wrong road, and had come kilometres out of our way, but that all we could do was to go on to a place called Lafayette. There we should find a highway that would eventually lead us into the Route Nationale.—This was not encouraging. It was oppressively hot in the shadeless valley. The road was bad, full of stones and ugly ruts and ridges, and before long degenerated into a mere unused cow-path, overgrown with grass, crossing the fields. We tried to ride; we tried to walk, pushing the machine. Both were equally hard work.——

“To a Frenchman any road’s good so he don’t have to climb a hill,” said J——, in a rage. “If I only had that fellow here!”

—We were walking at the moment.——

“Get on!” he cried, and I did.

—We bumped silently over the ruts.——

“Get off!” he ordered presently, and meekly I obeyed, for indeed I was beginning to be alarmed.

—He took the machine by the handle-bars and shook it hard.——

“You’ll break it!” cried I.

“I don’t care if I do,” growled he, and he gave it another shake.

—But at this crisis two women coming towards us, he inquired of them, with as good grace as he could command, the distance to Lafayette. They stood still and laughed aloud. He repeated his question; they laughed the louder. The third time he asked, they pointed to a solitary farm-house standing in the fields. He paused. I saw he was mentally pulling himself together, and I wished the women were out of harm’s way.——

“Nous—sommes—ici—dans—un—nation—de—bÊtes—de—fous!” he broke out, this time in French, a pause between each word. “Oui—tous—bÊtes—tous—fous—Vous—fous—aussi!”

—The women turned and ran.

I think they were right about Lafayette after all. In a few minutes we came to a good road. An auberge stood to one side, and a man at once approached us.——

We must come in, he said; it was a fÊte day, and we should be served with whatever we wanted.

But J—— was not to be so easily rid of his troubles.——

“Un—FranÇais—dans—Vienne,” he explained; “nous—a—envoyer—lÀ—bas.—Il—est—fou!”

“Yes, yes!” said the man soothingly; but, all the same, as it was a feast day, it seemed we must come to the auberge.

The feast consisted of boiled beef and rabbit; the holiday-makers, of a few peasants eating at rough wooden tables in front of the inn, a father and his four small sons drinking wine together and solemnly clinking glasses, and one man shooting with a cross-bow at diminutive Aunt Sallies.—We made a fair lunch, though when we refused wine the landlady asked, with disgust——

“Then you do not mean to eat?”

We sat with the peasants, who fell into conversation with us. When they heard how we had come from Vienne, they thought we must have had commerce in the villages in the valley to take such a route. And though J—— again explained about that fool in Vienne, they would have it we were pedlers.

When we set out, our first friend was at hand to ask if we had had all we wanted. The next day we saw by a printed notice that Sunday had been the Feast of Apples—a day whereon the people were begged to show every kindness to travellers through their land; and then we understood his politeness.

Perhaps a kilometre or two from the auberge we turned into the Grenoble road, and from that time onward there were but few sign-posts and the cross-roads were many.—It promised to be a

day of misfortunes. The country was hilly; we were always working up, with only occasional short coasts down, now through villages on the hillside, and now between steep wooded banks.—Once, when, sore perplexed to know which way to go, we were pedalling slowly in indecision, the road made a sudden curve, the banks fell on either side, and there at last they were, the long blue ranges, and, away beyond, one snow-crowned peak shining in sunlight.—After that, they—the delectable mountains of our Sentimental Journey—were always hopefully before us.

—Just outside St. Jean Bournay we came upon the right road from Vienne, but twenty-two kilometres from that city, we saw on the kilometre-stone, and we had already ridden forty-four!

—At the other end of the town we passed a theatre, a large canvas tent with two or three travelling vans close by. A crowd had gathered around it, and were staring with interest at a printed notice hung in front. It was an old American poster, picked up, who knows where? with the name of the play in French above and below it.

A woman in the crowd explained that a negro was the slave of a planter.——

“Or a Prussian, perhaps?” a man suggested.

“No; to be a negro, that is not to be a Prussian,” argued the woman.[B]

After La CÔte St. AndrÉ the road ran between low walnut-trees.—Now and then the monotony of their endless lines was broken by a small village, where men played bowls; and now and then the road was lively with well-dressed people, who jumped as the machine wheeled past them.——

“But that it frightened me, for example!” cried one.

But later a peasant called out—“O malheur, la femme en avant!”

—By-and-by the way grew lonelier, and we had for company the cows, great white stupid creatures, going home from pasture, and their drivers stupid as they, who roused themselves but to swear by the name of God, or to call out, “Thou beast of a pig!” to a cow frightened into the fields by the tricycle.—At last we turned into a broad road, where the walnuts gave place to poplars, and the level came to an end. At the foot of a long steep straight hill was Rives, deep down in a narrow valley.