ther amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can
read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me? What is
my relation to them, and theirs to me? Why should that beetle in the
grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow
like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its
beauty? Why should yonder rock, standing like a spar of some ship
wrecked in a cataclysm of the awful past, draw me to it as though it
were the image of a grand, yet unattainable and blighted, longing of
the human soul?

The gorge became so narrow and the rocks so high that there was a
twilight under the trees, which still dripped with the rain-drops of
last night's storm. Hesperis, columbine, and geranium contrasted their
floral colours with the deep green of the young grass. Some spots of
dark purple were on the ground where the light was most dim. They were
the petals and calyxes of that strange flower, lathraea, of the
broom-rape family. Each bloom seemed to be carried in the cup of
another flower. The plant had no leaves, for it was a thief that drew
its nutriment from the root of an honest little tree that had
struggled upward in the shade of strong and greedy rivals, and had
raised its head at length into the sunshine in spite of them.

After some difficulty in working round and over rocks that barred, the
passage, I came to a spot where it was impossible to follow the gorge
any farther. The walls narrowed to an opening a few yards wide, where
the stream fell in a cascade of some thirty feet. I took my mid-day
meal like a forester in the midst of this beautiful desolation, and
then, having found a spot where I could escape from the gorge of the
Alzou, I climbed the steep towards the north.

Here there was a blinding glare of sunshine reflected by the naked
stones. Goats looked down at me from the upper rocks near the line of
the blue sky. When I reached the boy who tended them, I asked him the
way to the road that I wished to strike upon the plateau. After
staring at me for some time, he screwed up his mouth, and said: '_Je
comprenais pas francais, you.' You_ did not apply to me, but to
himself, for it means _I_ in the Southern dialect.

Here was a boy unable to speak French, although all children in France
are now supposed to be educated in the official language of the
republic. Such cases are uncommon. In the Haut-Quercy, where _patois_
is the language of everybody, even in the t