To go to Arcachon in autumn is to have spread before one's eyes, for almost the entire journey, a perfect feast of colour. I never in my life saw such a magnificent revel of tints massed together in profusion, scattered broadcast over the country so lavishly and unstintingly, as passed rapidly before my eyes that day.

The vivid yellow of dwarf acacias; the brilliant crimson of some of the vines; the dazzling gold of others; the dark sombre, olive green of the dwarf pine-trees flecked here and there with splashes of vivid chrome yellow from the embroidery on their bark of some lichen; here and there a high ledge of thorn trees of pronounced terra-cotta. The prevailing note of colour everywhere was a deep russet; in some places merging into brilliant orange, picked out in sharp contrast with the pale yellow leaves of the acacia, and the fainter speckling of those of the silver birch, clear against the white glare of its trunk.

The whole of Nature's paint-box seemed flung into one passionate last declaration of colour on the canvas of the dying year. Flaming red, soft carmine, deepening into vermilion; rich orange fading to darker crimson; soft lilac changing swiftly to purple. The whole atmosphere, as far as the eye could reach, seemed flaming, shimmering with a glow as of a gorgeous sunset; red seemed literally painted deep into the air; it seemed pulsing with flame colour. High on the banks were piled the ferns in huge masses of crimson and rich chocolate brown; here and there turning to brick red the dying fronds carpeting thickly the ground all around and beneath the trees.

Now and again, coming as almost a relief from the very excess of vivid colour, would show up the welcome contrast given by a stretch of cold lilac slate, and in the middle distance a line of the faintest rose pink, delicate in tone, and indefinite as to outline. Beyond that, the pale blue of the distant pines, far up the rising ground upon the horizon. The stems of the pines are a rich, red brown, flaked in places, and covered, some of them, with various coloured lichens and fungi. These trees are, most of them, seamed and scarred with one slash down the middle for the resin. At a few inches from the ground is fastened a little cup, into which the resin flows, and at certain times men go round to collect the cupfuls. Each rÉsinier has, in order to earn his livelihood, to notch three hundred pines each day; this is done with a sort of hatchet. The little cups were an invention of a Frenchman named Hughes, in 1844, but were never used until some time after his death; so he personally reaped no benefit from the invention.

After the oil is collected, it is subjected to many distillations, some of which, as it is well known, are used medically. Here and there in the woods are stacked, in the shape of a hut, sloped and sloping, little bundles of faggots. Under the trees, white against the sombre shade of the pines, gleam the sandy paths which traverse the wide heathy plains which, alternately with the forests, make up the landscape of this part of the Landes. These are varied, now and again, by roads the colour of rich iron ore. The fences here are all made of the thinnest lath striplings and seem put up more as suggestions than to compel!

On the plains, cows wandered, accompanied always by their own special woman (generally well on in years, with a huge overshadowing hat and large umbrella) in waiting, who paused when the cow paused, moved on when she moved on, ruminated when she ruminated,—"Where the cow goes, there go I," her day's motto. We often saw a solitary cow meandering about up the middle path between two clumps of vines, and nibbling thoughtfully at the leaves of the vines themselves; these last looking like gooseberry bushes. Sometimes a countrywoman would drive three cows in front of her, and besides that would push a wheelbarrow full of cabbages. Other women, again, we noticed working on the line, and some washing in a stream, clad in red knickerbockers and huge boots.

As a rule, unlike our own spoilt meadows, the country is singularly little disfigured by advertisements, but everywhere we went we were confronted by the haunting words, "Amer picon," sometimes in placards on a cottage wall, sometimes in a field, sometimes blazoned up on a platform. At last it became so inevitable and so familiar, that we used to feel quite lost if a day should go by without a trace of its mystical letters anywhere! It occurred as continually before our eyes as the word "gentil" sounds on one's ears from the lips of the French madame. And everyone knows how often that is!

Just before reaching the station of Arcachon, our carriage stopped close beside a line of trucks. French trucks, in this part of the country, have an individuality all their own. They have a little twisting iron staircase, a little covered box seat high above the trucks' business end, and very wonderful inscriptions along their sides. On these we made out that it was etiquette for "Hommes 32, 40," and "Chevaux 8" to travel together! But if it were etiquette for them to do so, it would certainly, in practice, be as cramping and reasonless as are many of the injunctions of etiquette in social matters!

Arrived at Arcachon, we found an array of curious cabs, furnished inside with curtains on rings, of all kinds of flowrery patterns in which very fully-blown roses and enormous chrysanthemums figured largely. In one of these we drove to the hotel among the pines, to which as we thought we had been recommended. It turned out, later, that we had not been directed to that hotel at all, but then it was too late to change. No one in this hotel could speak a word of English intelligibly. We found later on that the concierge could say "va-terre," "Rome," "carrich" and "yes," but as these words had to be said many times before they even approached the distant semblance of any English words one had ever heard, and as, even when understood, they did not convey much information, taken singly and not in connection with any previous sentence, his assistance as interpreter was not to be counted on.

I went the round of the bedrooms accompanied by the manageress. She managed a good deal with her hands in the way of language, and I managed some, with the aid of my little dictionary, which was my inseparable companion throughout our entire trip, always excepting the nights; and even then I am not sure if I did not have it under my pillow!

Somehow the hotel had an empty feeling about its passages and rooms, and the bedroom shutters were all barred and consequently, when opened by the manageress, gave a sort of deserted, half drowsy air to the rooms, which prevented my being at all impressed with them. We descended the stairs again, my companion talking volubly but, to me, (owing to an unfortunate personal disability for all languages except my own), unintelligibly almost.

On our return to the entrance hall I found that an expectant group awaited us, consisting of the hotel proprietor, the concierge, a chambermaid, a daughter of the house, my friend and the coachman of the flowery-papered cab. Our luggage had also put in an appearance and was on the step by the door.

Nothing in the world—as far, of course, as regards minor matters of life—is so difficult or so unpleasant to retreat from, as is hotel, after you have been inspecting it in company with its authorities, when they definitely expect you mean to remain, and when your luggage has been removed from your cab by your too obsequious coachman! I felt my decision weaken, die in my throat. I had fully meant on the way downstairs to declare a negative to mine host's offer of accommodation. Presently I had swallowed it, for on what ground could I now trump up an excuse, and direct the removal of our portmanteaux to an adjoining hotel? and the next thing was to face the thing like a man and order our traps to be taken to our room.

And, after all, we were very fairly comfortable during our stay, until confronted by an exorbitant charge at the end—my disinclination to remain, in the first instance, being merely due to the somewhat forsaken, gloomy look of the rooms, giving a certain oppressive introductory atmosphere to the hotel.

November is the "off" season at Arcachon, and I can well understand that it should be so, for there seemed no particular reason why anybody should go and stay there at that time! I had been recommended, rather mistakenly as it afterwards proved, to try it for my health, but it was so bitterly cold the whole time of our stay that I rather regretted having gone there at all, as I had come abroad in search of a mild, warm climate. However, one good point in the hotel was that the salle-À-manger was always well warmed, and evenly warmed, with pipes round the walls, and it was exceedingly prettily situated in the midst of the pines.

There were but twelve of us who daily frequented it; and we might almost have belonged to the Trappist Order for all the conversation that was heard. Never have I been at such quiet table d'hÔtes as those that took place there. The company consisted of an old man and his wife, who kept their table napkins in a flowery chintz case which the man never could tackle, but left to the woman's skill to manipulate each evening. Both seemed to think laughter was most wrong and improper in public. A consumptive, very shy young man who had to have a hot bottle for his feet; a consumptive older man whose continual cough approached sometimes, during the courses, to the very verge of something else, and who passed his handkerchief from time to time to his mother for inspection; a very bent and solitary man by the door who had "shallow" hair growing off his temples, deeply sunken eyes, black moustache and receding chin, and who had the air of a conspirator, and a few other uninteresting couples.

The menu was delightfully worded sometimes. Such items as "Veal beaten with carrots," "Daubed green sauce," "Brains in butter," proved no more attractive to the palate than they were to the eye. But, apart from these delicacies, the fare was exceedingly appetising; oysters, as common as sparrows, played always a large part, (the charge per dozen, 1½ d.) Then, the last thing at night, our cheerful, bright-faced chambermaid used to bring us the most delicious iced milk.

There was a curious, but so far as we could see un-enforced, regulation hung up in the salle-À-manger, to the effect that if one was late for table d'hÔte one would be punished by a fine of fifty centimes. The evenings we usually spent in our bedroom; it being the off-season there was practically nowhere else to go to. But it was cosy enough up there, with our pine log fire blazing up the chimney, its brown streams of liquid resin running down the surface of the wood, alight, and dripping from time to time in dazzling splashes on to the tiles below.

The only drawback to our comfort—and it was a drawback—was that the young man who had such unpleasant coughs and upheavals during table d'hÔte paced restlessly and creakily up and down overhead continuously, both in the evening as well as in the early morning, and was, to judge by the sounds, always trying the effects of his bedroom furniture in different parts of the room, and generally altering its geography. He had quite as pronounced a craze for patrolling as had John Gabriel Borkman.

There are few more irritating sounds, I think, than a creak, whether it be of the human boot or of a door. Of the many penances which have been devised from time to time could there be a more irritating form of nerve flagellation than an insistent, recurring squeak when you are vainly endeavouring to write an article, an important letter, or, if it be night, to get to sleep? A squeak in two parts, as this particular one was, was calculated to make one ready for any deed of violence! One knew so well when one must expect to hear it, that it got in time to be like the hole in a stocking which, as an old nurse's dictum ran, one "looks for, but hopes never to find!" Thus one half unconsciously listened for the creak. So great is the power of the Insignificant Thing!

There were other sounds which broke the stillness of the night at Arcachon. In England cocks crow, according to well-authenticated tradition, handed down from cock to cock from primitive times, at daybreak; in Arcachon they crow all through the night and, indeed, keep time with the hours. They have, too, a more elaborate and ornate crow. They do not accentuate, as ours do, the final "doo," but introduce instead semi-quavers in the "dle;" so that it sounds thus: "Cock-a-doo-a-doo-dle-doo." I noticed that they had a tendency to leave off awhile at daybreak, while it was yet dark.

Then, sounding mysteriously and from afar on one's ear, came the quick tones of the bell calling to early Mass from the little church in the village street below.

Of ancient history Arcachon has its share. It was, in the thirteenth century, the port of the Boiens, and in old records one finds it mentioned under the name "Aecaixon" or "Arcasson," "Arcanson" being a word used to designate one of the resin manufactures. In the beginning of things, Arcachon was nothing but a desert, its forest surrounding the little chapel founded by Thomas Illyricus for the seamen. During the whole of the middle ages the country had the entire monopoly of the pine oil industry, which was turned to account in so many ways.