che-The Landscape of the Landes-The People Of

aight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne-and you will observe that such a line w

rs on path

nts, for wan

f France. Excepting here and there small patches of poor, ill-cultivated land, the whole country is a solitary desert-black with pine-wood, or white with vast plains of drifting sand. By these two great features of the district, occasionally diversified by sweeps of green morass, intersected by canals and lanes of stagnant and often brackish water, the Landes take a goodly slice out

people live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they have none of the national characteristics-little, perhaps, of the national blood. They are saturnine, gloomy, hypochondriac, dismally passing dismal lives in the depths of their black forests, their dreary swamps, and their

question-the Bordeaux and Teste line-is the sole enterprise o

plains to a Briton all about Perfide Albion!-"Railways, monsieur," he said, "as all the world knows, have achieved the ruin of the Old

, and morasses of the Landes are broken by a vast shallow basin, its edges scolloped with innumerable creeks, bays, and winding friths, into which, through a breach in the coast line of sand-hills, flow the waters of the Atlantic. On the southern side of this estuary lie two or three scattered groups of hovels, inhabited by fishermen and shepherds-the most important of the hamlets being known as Teste, or Teste-la-buch. Between Teste and Bordeaux, the only line of communication was a rutty road, half sand and half morass, and the only traffic was the occasional pilgrimage to the salt water of some patient sent thither at all risks by the Bordeaux doctors, or now and then the transit towards the city of the Garonne of the products of a day's lucky fishing, borne in panniers on the backs of a string of donkeys. Folks, however, were sanguine. The speculation "came out," shares got up, knowing people sold out, simple people held on, and the line was actually constructed. No doubt it was cheaply got up. Ground could be had in the Landes almost for the asking, and from terminus to

" There was no help for it, and I sauntered into the nearest café to read long disquisitions on what was then all the vogue in the political world-the "situation." I found the little marble slabs deserted-even the billiard-table abandoned, and all the guests collected round the white Fayence stove. Joining them, I perceived the

h, "what does Monsieur Tetar

and then getting up again, looking all the time with a sort of stupid blinking stare at

fellows, with black beards, and honest tradesman-look

proprietor and instructor, "what does Madame T

ydrophobia. The spectators were enraptured. "It is actually her voice," said one. "Only the dog is too good-looking for her," said another. "Voilà, petite!" vociferated a third, holding a huge p

han the injured and maligned Tetard himself. Instantly he broke into loud objurgations. He knew how that atrocious old Père Grignon had taught his dog to malign him, the bête misérable! But as for it, he would poison it-shoot it-drown it; and as for Père Grignon, who ought to have more sense, all the quartier knew what he was-an imb

be écraséd and abiméd as soon as caught. There was, of course, great laughter at the whole proceeding; and then the group betook themselves to the marble slabs and dominoes-the ins

ng along over a negative sort of country-here a bit of heath, there a bit of vineyard-now a bald spot of sand, anon a plot of irregularly-cut stubble; while a black horizon of pine-wood rose gradually on the right and left. On flew the train, and drearier grew the landscape; the heath was bleaker-the pines began to appear in clumps-the sand-stretches grew wider-every thing green, and fertile, and riant disappeared. He, indeed, who enters the Landes, appears to have crossed a French frontier, and left the merry land behind. No more bright vineyards-no more rich fields of waving corn-no more clustered villages-no more chateau-turrets-no more tapering spires. You look up to heaven to see whether the sky has not changed, as well as the la

"you are new

mitt

rees-these, monsieur, give u

est! What

st? Resin,

ouse and a quick eye; "resin, monsieur; t

e ground. The resin perspires out of the wood, flows slowly and glutinously down the gash, and in a month or so, according to

And then, sir" (addressing me), "we barrel our crop of the Landes.

e to drink it so well,

und it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the n

ect to find French in this chaos? No, no; it is s

le keen-eyed man. "Moi, je suis de Landes; and the Landes lang

eaux gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a

s a sacré tonnerre of a barbar

angerous swamp, in which many a donkey coming up from Teste with fish to you of Bordeaux was smothered; and so it got to be quite proverbial among the drivers of the

ur, and they have bad food and no wine. But nevertheless, monsieur, they are bons enfants-braves gens, monsieur. They love their pine-woods and their sands as much as other people do their corn-fields and their vines, monsieur. They would die, monsieur, if you took them away from the sand and the trees. They are not like the Auvergnats, who go in troops to Paris to carry water from the fountains, and who are betes-betes-bien betes! They stay at home, monsieur. Th

n similar to the first-a shed-a clearing, and black pine all around. There were just three persons on the rough platform-the station-master in a blouse, and two yellow-breeched gens-d'armes. What could they find to occupy them among these drear pine-woods? What thief, who had not made a vow of voluntary starvation, or who had not a morbid taste for living upon resin, would ever have ventured among them? But the authorities! Catch a bit of France without an "

n, flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes, perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the endless

oodland lakes. Sometimes, as in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described, these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean, and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For, forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the

but the high conical hat with broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all. Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish petticoats, saunt

a way of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings

ordeaux gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctant

hey kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money-not that they had much of that-and their crops-not that they were of great value either-and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, th

heir great fault," meekl

is their great fault. A Landes shepherd would

f the game. Their motto is, win anyhow; so it is no worse for one than

here burst upon my eyes a glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England, the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and fuzzy, and rusty, compa

g at the soil, and great wains and carts drawn by oxen, looking like black specks upon a great, fresh, green leaf. But, in a moment, I saw something more. Could I believe my eyes? A ship! Yes, verily, a ship, fast

ry people have come down with their carts to fill them with that green slimy seaweed, which makes capital manure; and some of them, perhaps, have brought casks of

s drawn up beneath them, nets drying, a considerable fishy smell pervading the atmosphere, with, beyond again, the black, unvarying mantle of pine-woods. There is a very good hotel at Teste; thanks to its being one of the Bordeaux watering-p