hia is to enter a zone of tropical luxuriance and
warmth. Given this absurd disposition, I could not fail to flatter
myself, on reaching La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to
perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the _caractere
meridional_. Really a great many things had a hint of it. For that
matter it seems to me that to arrive in the south at a bound--to wake up
there, as it were--would be a very imperfect pleasure. The full pleasure
is to approach by stages and gradations; to observe the successive
shades of difference by which it ceases to be the north. These shades
are exceedingly fine, but your true south-lover has an eye for them all.
If he perceives them at New York and Philadelphia--we imagine him boldly
as liberated from Boston--how could he fail to perceive them at La
Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are lined with
arcades--good, big, straddling arcades of stone, such as befit a land
of hot summers and which recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky
porticos of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide _place d'armes_
which looked for all the world like the piazza of some dead Italian
town, empty, sunny, grass-grown, with a row of yellow houses overhanging
it, an unfrequented cafe with a striped awning, a tall, cold, florid,
uninteresting cathedral of the eighteenth century on one side, and on
the other a shady walk which forms part of an old rampart. I followed
this walk for some time, under the stunted trees, beside the
grass-covered bastions; it is very charming, winding and wandering,
always with trees. Beneath the rampart is a tidal river, and on the
other side, for a long distance, the mossy walls of the immense garden
of a seminary. Three hundred years ago La Rochelle was the great French
stronghold of Protestantism, but to-day it appears to be a nursery of
Papists.

The walk upon the rampart led me round to one of the gates of the town,
where I found some small modern fortifications and sundry red-legged
soldiers, and, beyond the fortifications, another shady walk--a _mail_,
as the French say, as well as a _champ de manoeuvre_--on which latter
expanse the poor little red-legs were doing their exercise. It was all
very quiet and very picturesque, rather in miniature; and at once very
tidy and a little out of repair. This, however, was but a meagre
back-view of La Rochelle, or poor side-view at best. There are other
gates than the small fortified aper