IT is a truism, venerable to the verge of dotage, to say that the way not to enjoy travelling is to do it at a rush, spending the days in sight-seeing, and the nights in the train; but this disposition of things has one merit, it keeps the anguish out of farewells. The heart-tendrils have not time to weave themselves round the concierge, the chambermaid is still your bitterest foe, the waiter has not yet risen to the position of an unnaturally obliging brother; you are too hurried to discover the full charms of the armoire À glace in the bedroom, or the verandah outside the salon windows, and you scurry from one hotel to another, unregretful and heart-whole.

But a week—and we were the best part of a week at Pauillac—gives ample time for the forming of those ill-fated foreign friendships which are destined never, as Rossetti says, ‘to find an earthly close.’ I do not know from how many hotels in various parts of France we have gone forth sorrowing, and asseverating our intention of returning there directly our affairs in Ireland could be wound up so as to permit of our leaving that country for life. To their melancholy number must now be added the Grand HÔtel du Commerce, Pauillac. On the last sad day we had to start early,—a proceeding that is a strain upon the constitution of any hotel,—but never, on our laziest mornings, had we such lavish cans of eau bouillante, nor such hot coffee, nor such a foaming jug of freshly boiled milk. LÉonie the chambermaid, Louis the garÇon, Jeanne the cook, all vied with each other in fond efforts to enhance the poignancy of parting; even the bill, usually a styptic to the tender pain of farewell, was affectingly moderate.

‘Black,’ the big dog, paced beside us to the curious little vehicle, not unlike a county Cork inside car, that was to take us to the station; he was bestridden

as usual by the monkey, and in her softened mood my cousin endured the clammy clutch of ‘Bamboo’ upon her finger with scarcely a shudder. Jeanne’s little girl had given us a flaming bouquet of scarlet geraniums and heliotrope; two bunches of grapes had been pressed upon us by Madame, to sustain us on our journey; and, at the last moment, our friend who had been the first to introduce us to the secrets of wine-making darted forward with a card addressed to the proprietor of a restaurant in Bordeaux, on which that gentleman was prayed to serve to ‘ces demoiselles’ a bottle of Grand St. Lambert, ‘85, at the expense of its original producer. Of course we left vowing to return for the vendange next year, and trying to believe that we should be as good as our word. It seemed the only way given to us of marking our sense of their kindness.

We had to wait at the station, seated on our luggage in default of benches, before the train—the tallest we had ever seen—came in, towering over the platformless station after the arrogant fashion of French trains; and having scaled its precipitous sides, and struggled up into what we expected to be its lofty saloons, our hats were knocked over our eyes by the ceiling. We then found that the unusual height of the train was caused by the third-classes being mounted on top, above our more honourable heads, and that, in moving about the carriage, it was safer to go on all-fours.

It was a long hot drive across Bordeaux to the Gare de la Bastide, and it gave a fine sense of freedom to leave all luggage there, and set forth again on foot, unhampered by anything except a small cherished hand-basket. We took the ferry-boat across to the other side of the river—a little strenuous black steamer that fretted and panted across the wide stream like a broken-winded pony trying to bolt. We did not know our way, and asked advice on the subject from as many people as possible, only taking care to wait till our most recent informant was round a corner. I once omitted this precaution in Cork, and while I was blandly putting further inquiries to a postman, an awful voice cried after me—

‘I suppose you think I’m a liar!’

A thing that has made me circumspect in such matters ever since.

Our way led through the market—a great iron tent, filled with the most variegated colours, voices, and smells. We roamed through damp, brilliant aisles, with vivid splendours of fruit and flowers mounting high over our heads on either hand; we explored the remarkable collections of birds, beasts, and herbs that were being confidently purchased by the housewives of Bordeaux for family consumption; and, with a bow of recognition to a poisonous barrowload of fungi, we pursued our way into the sunny street wherein was the restaurant which had been indicated to us by our late host. We presented the card entitling us to the bottle of Grand St. Lambert without delay, and it was presently borne in in state by the proprietor himself—a civility obviously owing to the curiosity that was displayed on his red and round-eyed countenance. It was a large bottle, with a beautiful white-and-gold label, and after we had scientifically smelt its bouquet, and slowly absorbed as much as we thought becoming, morally and physically, there was still two-thirds of the bottle left, far too much either to squander upon the waiter or to finish ourselves. The waiter had left a mound of grapes in front of us, and had decorously retired; on a buffet behind us were a number of old newspapers; the hand-basket was on the floor at our feet; all was as perfect as if it had occurred in a romance of detective life. My second cousin stealthily abstracted an IntransigÉant of a responsible age from the buffet, wrapped up the bottle in its woolly folds, and forced it diagonally into the basket, while the various matters it dispossessed were forced, diagonally or otherwise, into our pockets, so that when I came to pay the bill, the expeditionary purse lay as deep as the coins at the base of a public building.

Libourne is only half an hour by train from Bordeaux,—a chequered half-hour of bursts in and out of tunnels, and of consequently intermittent amenities on the part of a resplendently-dressed newly-married pair, who faced us all the way there,—and the bridge that spans a placid curve of the Dordogne, under the town of Libourne, came into view so unexpectedly that we had hardly time to gather our things together before the train stopped in the station. We had been fortunate enough to have been given an introduction to a gentleman and his wife who spend each vintage season in their charming little old-fashioned country-house near Libourne, and we found that their kindness had even gone to the length of waiting for us outside the barrier that in France so relentlessly separates the travelling public from the rest of mankind. It was humiliating to discover that Monsieur and Madame A. (I suppose the time-honoured formula must again be employed) both spoke English so many thousand times better than we could speak French, that our acquaintance with that language became wholly superfluous; but it was also refreshing. It was a wonderful thing to feel that we need no more take thought to our luggage, or to the reproving or instruction of porters in a foreign tongue. Monsieur A. had a wholesome belief in female incapacity, and in an instant we found that we were no longer mere literary tramps, but had been raised to the serene and almost forgotten position of ladies of quality.

In a very short time we found ourselves being whirled off in a carriage to Quinault, the country-house aforesaid, and were being told all manner of strange things. We had not looked at a newspaper since we left Paris, and it was hard to believe that the most notable figure in Irish politics should have left them for ever, and no echo of such a thing come to us, even in the quiet, far-away vineyards of the MÉdoc. We were now in the St. Emilion district, and without wishing to insult the MÉdoc, it must be said that it cannot compare in beauty with the opposite side of the Gironde. There was an air of generous luxuriance about the vines themselves that began to realise for us the vineyards of our more poetical visions. The stunted little shrubs on which we had been forming our eye were no more to be seen. Tall bushes, trained to spread like fans on espaliers, had taken their place, and pictorially, at any rate, there can be no comparison between the two systems. There was a sunset that evening that made the first sight of the St. Emilion vines a thing greatly to be remembered. Quinault is a scientific vineyard, and the charm of colour conferred by the blue-green sulphate of copper that stains all the leaves, is a fine confirmation of the theory that the useful is necessarily the beautiful. These blue-green leaves had turned to a mysterious metallic grey in the evening light; up the middle aisle came a cart drawn by a big white horse, a scarlet-capped man was standing up in it between the barrels of grapes, his figure showing ‘dark against day’s golden death;’ after it followed a procession of vintagers, women and boys mostly, the yellow light behind them giving to the long row of figures the effect of being a company of saints on an early Italian background; and, last of all, came a little, incredibly bowed woman, who had been vintaging here at Quinault for the last eighty years—La MÈre MÉmÉ, the oldest and the most conscientious vendangeuse of the district.

‘She is always the first at the end of the row,’ we were told, ‘and she never leaves a bunch behind her, and she has eighty-seven years; n’est-ce pas, ma MÈre?’

MÈre MÉmÉ admitted the eighty-seven years with an almost bored acquiescence. She had been very old for so long that she was less proud of it than she had

probably been when she was eighty. She sat down on a barrel, and a sketch of her was made as speedily as might be, while the sky faded from gold to red, and the rest of the vintagers slowly tore themselves from the charms of looking over the sketcher’s shoulder to go to the excellent dinner that was waiting for them in a long vine-covered barn. Once more we tasted the vintage soup, and smacked our lips, and said, with facetious under-statement of the case, that it was pas mal, and once more we prodded at the cauldron of ragoÛt, and felt the hunger of gluttony rise within us as we smelt its rich and composite fragrance. We were connoisseurs in vintage cookery by this time, and had been shown the mysteries of many vintage kitchens, but as the exhibition always took place a long time after tea and a short time before dinner, it never failed to make us regret that we also were not vintagers.

We wandered back to the house through the rose-garden, and though we pretend to no horticultural knowledge, by dint of recognising ‘La France’s’ timid flush, and the orange glow of that poetically-named flower, ‘William Allan Richardson,’ we took a higher place in the estimation of their proprietor, and were encouraged to adventurous remarks on their culture as practised in Ireland, which, we fear, must have hopelessly degraded the gardeners of that country in the eyes of Monsieur A. It was hard to talk of anything else but roses and fruit at dinner, when the centre of the table was a masterpiece of both one and the other; but we were beginning to feel less restricted now in our choice of subjects. During our last flight into polite society our ideas were to us much as the creatures in the Ark must have been to Noah. Our brains were full of interesting things which we wished to plant out on the world, but when we thrust them forth, they could find no rest for the soles of their feet in the strange sea of French conversation, and they returned to sit lamentably upon the shelf, with all the other agreeable but untranslatable notions.

Now, however, we had not only enlarged our vocabulary, but we had also lost a good deal of the decent diffidence that had at first prompted us to hold our tongues, and we found ourselves conversing gaily, with a hideous disregard of the trammels of verbs and the pitfalls of gender. I had nearly finished my dinner before I realised that in asking my neighbour to pass la selle, I was unreasonably demanding a saddle, and it was almost dreadful that that neighbour gave no sign of what he felt, and merely told me that to eat du sel in such quantities as is my wont was an habitude Anglaise. It would have been consolatory to have been laughed at openly on such occasions, but I suppose such altruistic politeness would be beyond the power of most people; certainly no one we ever met soared to such heights, and I am sure we are not capable of it ourselves.

We had an expedition before us the next day, and the evening had to be short. However, after dinner we strolled out into the darkness, mellowed by the scent of many roses, and went to have a look at the vendangeuses. The ladies had a dining-room apart from the gentlemen, and when we looked in at them, were still sitting over their wine with a fine indifference to the charms of general society in the barn. MÈre MÉmÉ, at the end of the long table, with the lamplight deepening her wrinkles into trenches, and sinking her eyes into wells of ink, might have been an over-printed engraving of Rembrandt’s mother. Gathered round her were three or four hardly less ancient ladies, equally suggestive of Rembrandt’s relations, and a long array of dark-haired, white-coifed women and girls were to be seen, more or less dimly in the indifferent light, finishing their jugs of vin ordinaire, all talking at the tops of their voices, and all, after the first stare, comporting themselves as if no curious foreign eyes were observing them from the doorway.

The evening closed with one dramatic episode. A long low dark room; at one end a bare table; on one side of it an excited group of women; on the wall behind, a smoky lamp, throwing a lurid light on two resolute-looking men, who stood behind the table on which a swarthy victim lay trembling, held tightly by one, while the other hurriedly divested him of all clothing save a fur boa and two pair of boots.

Madame A. was having her black poodle clipped.