wherewith to slay them. Perhaps he will show them the
deadly weapon, and hope that they will take the hint; but there is too
much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering
even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however,
that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the
grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of
story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he
is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in
France--men who are really devout, but never sanctimonious, whose
candour is a cause of constant astonishment, who are good-natured to
excess, and who are more open-hearted than many children. Their
friendship goes out readily to meet the stranger, and, speaking from
my own experience, I can say that it wears well. In the street, on the
other side of the house, six women have perched themselves in a row.
They have come out to talk and enjoy the coolness of the evening, and,
in order that their tender consciences may not prick them for being
idle, they are paring potatoes, and getting ready other vegetables for
the morrow. They all scream together in Languedocian, which,
by-the-bye, is anything but melodious here when spoken by the common
people. It becomes much less twangy and harsh a little farther South.
How these six charmers on chairs can all listen and talk at the same
time is not easy to understand. The truth is, very little listening is
done in this part of the world. The saying _On se grise en parlant_ is
quite applicable here. People often get drunk on nothing stronger than
the flow of their own words.

All the women being now on their way to the land of dreams, and
consequently quiet for a few hours, and all the sounds of the earth
being hushed save the song of the crickets among the vine-leaves, and
in the fruit-trees of the moonlit garden, I will try to see Figeac up
the vista of the ages, and if I succeed, perhaps the reader may be
helped at the same time to gather interest in this queer old place,
whose name, having been made familiar to the English who followed
Henry II to France in the twelfth century, is perhaps a reason why
their descendants will not 'skip' at first sight these few pages of
local history.

The early history of Figeac, or what has long passed as such, is based
upon an ingenious stratification of fraud, arising out of a very old
quarrel between the monks of Figeac and the