vergrown, fussy town, a bit more
delightfully environed than Tarbes, but still not at all what we had
pictured it. We knew it to be a tourist resort, but we were hardly
prepared for the tea-shops and the "bars" and the papers--in English
and "American," as a local newsdealer told us when we went to him to
buy the inevitable picture postcards.

We found out, too, that Pau has long held a unique position as the
leading hunting centre on the Continent. It costs sixty francs a day
for the hire of a saddle-horse, and from 350 francs to four hundred
francs for the month--certainly rather dear. There are, as a rule,
from thirty to forty hunters available for hire each year, but many
of them are reserved by old stagers. Of privately owned horses
following the hunt, the number would usually somewhat exceed two
hundred. The hounds meet three times a week, and the municipality of
Pau shows its appreciation of the good that hunting does for the
Pyrenees resort by voting a subsidy of five thousand francs.

What history and romance there is about Pau is pretty well blotted
out by twentieth-century snobbism, it would seem.

One learns that Pau was the seat of a chateau of the princes of Bearn
as early as the tenth century. Its great splendour and importance
only came with the establishment here of the residence of Gaston IV.,
Comte de Foix, the usurper of the throne of Navarre in 1464. In his
train came a parliament, a university, an academy, and a mint.
Finally came the birth of Henri Quatre, and one may yet see the great
turtle-shell used by the afterwards gay monarch for a cradle. These
were gay times for Pau, and the same gaiety, though of a forced
nature, exists to-day with the throngs of English and Americans who
are trying hard to make of it a social resort. May they not succeed.
One thing they have done is to raise prices for everything to
everybody. This is bad enough to begin with, and so with this parting
observation Pau is crossed off the list.

There are eight highroads which cross the frontier passes from France
into Spain, and two lines of railway, one along the border of the
Atlantic and Hendaye, and the other following the Mediterranean coast
to Barcelona.

"_Il n'y a plus de Pyrenees,_" we were told as we were leaving Pau.
It seemed that news had just been received that in fourteen hours a
Spanish aeronaut had covered the 730 kilometres from Pau to Grenada
"_comme les oiseaux._" Truly, after this, there are no