ver, and a chain of lakes that could be followed for
two miles--I set out the next morning to find it. I might have spent
hours in vain casting about, but for the help of a peasant, who
offered, quite disinterestedly, to be my guide. He was an old man,
with a very Irish face, and eyes that laughed at life. But for his
language he would have seemed a perfectly natural growth of Cork or
Kerry.

Here may be the place to remark that the stock of the ancient Cadurci
appears to have been much less impaired here in an ethnological sense
by the mingling of races than in the country round Cahors. The
peasants, generally, have nothing distinctively Southern in their
appearance, although they speak a dialect which is in the main a Latin
one, the Celtic words that have been retained being in a very small
proportion. Gray or blue eyes are almost as frequent among them as
they are with the English, and many of the village children have hair
the colour of ripening maize.

We left the fertile valley and rose upon the stone-scattered _causse_
where hellebore, spurges, and juniper were the only plants not cropped
close to the earth by the flocks of sheep which thrive upon these
wastes. All the sheep are belled, but the bells they wear are like big
iron pots hanging upon their breasts. Each pot has a bone that swings
inside of it and serves as a hammer. The chief use of these bells is
to prevent the animal from leaving its best wool, that of the breast,
upon the thorns of bushes.

We have now reached the brink of the pit, which is not bottomless, but
looks so until the eye faintly distinguishes something solid at a
depth that has been measured at 175 feet. The opening is almost
circular, with a diameter at the orifice of 116 feet. This prodigious
well, sunk in successive layers of secondary rock, looks as if it had
been regularly quarried; but men could never have had the motive for
giving themselves so much trouble. Did the rock fall in here? No
explanation is satisfactory. How it fills one with awe to look into
the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some
distance beyond the side of the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic
arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the
clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish
hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond
that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of
heaven pass over, to a thicker da