orgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special
pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and
driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.

From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every
Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend
mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer
than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green
tail-coat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to
match. I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings,
there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines,
is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday
business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a
woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing,
catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had
waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had
the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a
canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a
respectable lady must study to conform.

Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
the papers in a cafe. The _Courrier_(such is the name of one) should
leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voyage, and arrive at
Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares
not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
stage-coaching than we are used to see it.

As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill-top rises and
falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
new and farther