m the Quercy.

Besides the towers and exterior walls, there are some chambers of the
old castle in good preservation. The chapel is still roofed, and the
altar-stone is in its place. In an elevated chamber at the lower end,
the dead were laid while awaiting burial.

Descending to the village, I entered the parish church--a Gothic
building of the fourteenth century, containing many interesting
details. The oak stalls, each with a quaint human figure carved upon
it, are exceedingly curious. Outside the church little girls were
playing, in the charge of a Sister who had a beautiful sweet face. She
showed me the way to the next village, where I hoped to find shelter
from the gathering storm. I have a pleasant picture in the mind of
Castelnau--a bowery, ancient, mossy place, with vines climbing about
the houses or on trellises in the little steep gardens, and a golden
bloom of stonecrop upon the rough walls.

I reached the village of Prudhomat just as the storm burst over it,
and took shelter in a small inn, which, like most of those in the
country, had its room for the public upstairs. Two women who were
there made the sign of the cross each time the lightning flashed--a
widespread custom of the French peasantry; but a couple of men who
were eating salad and bread paid no heed to the furious cannonade that
was kept up by the darkened heavens. It was four o'clock, and they
were having their _gouter_. The peasants of the Quercy do not live on
the fat of the land; but they generally have five meals a day, two
more than the middle-class French. They begin with soup at a very
early hour in the morning; then they have their dinner about ten,
which is chiefly soup; at three or four they have a _gouter_ of bread
and cheese, salad or fruit; and at six or seven they have their
supper, which is soup again.

The old woman who sat near the window worked diligently with her
distaff laden with hemp, except when the flashing lightning made her
stop to raise her thin hand to her forehead. She was twisting the
thread from which the sheets of the country are made. They are coarse,
but they last longer than the hands that work the hemp, and descend
from mother to daughter.

More than two hours I waited in this auberge while the rain fell in
torrents, the lightning blazed, and the thunder crashed. The whole sky
was the colour of slate. When at length a line of bright light
appeared in the western sky, I could curb my impatience no longer,