ds he
especially loved, and sometimes he would persuade them to stay quiet for
a few minutes by singing some country songs, while he took out his roll
of paper and made rough sketches of them.

[Illustration: The bright-eyed lizards he especially loved.]

* * * * *

But after a while Palissy grew restless, and before he was twenty he
left home and travelled on foot over the south of France, gaining fresh
knowledge at every step, as those do who keep their wits about them. He
had no money, so he paid his way by the help of his pencil, as he was
later to do in the little town of Saintes, taking portraits of the
village innkeeper or his wife, or drawing plans for the new rooms the
good man meant to build now that business was so thriving, and measuring
the field at the back of the house, that he thought of laying out as a
garden of fruits and herbs. And as the young man went he visited the
cathedrals in the towns as well as the forges and the manufactories, and
never rested till he found out why this city made cloth, and that one
silk, and a third wonderful patterns of wrought iron.

We do not know exactly how long Palissy remained on his travels, but as
there was no need for him to hurry and so much for him to see he
probably was away for some years. On his return he seems to have settled
down in the little town of Saintes, on the river Charente, where he
supported himself by doing what we should call surveying work, measuring
the lands of the whole department, and reporting on the kind of soil of
which they were made, so that the government might know how to tax them.

* * * * *

In the year 1538 Palissy married, and a year later came the event which
influenced more than any other the course of his future life. A French
gentleman named Pons, who had spent a long while at the Italian court of
Ferrara, returned to France, bringing with him many beautiful things,
among others an 'earthenware cup, wonderfully shaped and enamelled.'
Pons happened to meet Palissy, and finding that the same subjects
interested them both, he showed him the cup. The young man could
scarcely contain himself at the sight. For some time he had been turning
over in his mind the possibility of discovering enamel, or glaze, to put
on the earthen pots, and now here, in perfection, was the very thing he
was looking for.

During the next two or three years, when he was busy surveying the