and, hoisting my pack, I was soon on the road to Carennac.

A little beyond the village I passed a gipsy encampment ranged along
the side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents;
but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over
with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin
and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of
the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young
burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled
their mouths with dust. Small portable stoves--alas! not the
traditional fire with three stakes set in the ground and tied at the
top, with the pot swinging therefrom--had been lighted outside the
caravans, and gipsy women were making the evening soup. Bright-eyed,
shock-headed, uncombed, unwashed, but exceedingly happy gipsy children
were tumbling over one another on the wet turf, showing so much of
their brown skin between their rags that they would have been more
comfortable and quite as decent had they been naked. A hideous old
man, merely skin and bones, sitting nose and knees together upon a
sack, did not take my curiosity in good part, but glared at me
morosely. The younger men of this interesting community were
elsewhere--perhaps mending saucepans, or reassuring ducks alarmed by
the thunderstorm. A musician of the party must have been kept in by
the bad weather, for from one of the caravans came the diabolic
screech of a wheezing concertina that had got rid of all its ideals
and dreams of distinction.

The bright line in the west moved very slowly upwards, and the rain
continued to fall, although less drenchingly than before. The setting
sun strove with the cloud-rack and coloured the veil of vapour that
its rays could not pierce. The nightingales and thrushes in the
shrubs, and the finches amidst the later blossoms of the may, took
heart again, and the song rose from so many throats near and far that
the whole valley of the Dordogne was filled with warbling. As the
birds grew drowsy the frogs came out to spend a happy night on the
margins of the pools and the brooks, until their joyful screaming and
croaking was a universal chorus. I was by the side of the broad river
that flowed calmly through the fairest meadows. The face of the
stream, the pools in the road, the grass and the leaves, were
brightened with the orange glow of a veiled light as of some sacred
fire shining in th