tening of its eye by the lanthorn as I fell; but mine was the mortal wound. My ball had struck immediately below the eye, and lodged in the brain. We were both lauded to the skies. At daylight the keeper of the caravan returned; and assuaged the general alarm, by telling us that the chetah was the only tenant of the waggon that had escaped, and that all his stock of lions and tigers were safe. But one still more formidable source of anxiety remained. What had become of the village belle? Her brothers had searched the country, without finding a vestige of her. But there is a balm for all things, if we will but wait for it. While her whole relationship were in agony, a chaise was seen driving into the village with a huge white cockade hung over the horses' nose. The driver was the lover of the lady; the maiden herself was now a bride. She had been swept away to the altar, the night before, "nothing loath," in the midst of the general confusion; and in the midst of the general joy at her being still in the land of the living, all was forgiven and forgotten. The adventure was now completed. I was solicited to stay for the wedding feast in the afternoon, which I did; and to stay for a week, a month, or a year, all which offers I declined. I spent a day of as honest festivity as if I had spent it at a Cabinet dinner; and next morning took my leave, followed by a hundred prayers, and the tears from a troop of bright eyes, the tribute of my achievement, such as it was.

At length I touched on the land of romance; on the right the Bearnois, on the left Roussillon, and before me the Pyrenees, at the distance of thirty miles, forming a long and striking chain of pinnacles on the horizon. The day was cool for August, and I thought that I already felt the refreshing breezes of the mountains. The Garonne, which flowed along the plain in placid beauty, was more probably the refrigerator. The country was evidently improving as it approached the slope of the Pyrenees; the villages were more numerous, and more pastoral. I saw several large vineyards which were all in full cluster; and the cottages were frequently trellised with roses and woodbines.

The whole scene reminded me of some of the midland counties of England; and even the mountains were not yet of that overpowering height which precluded the similitude. It is to be remembered, that I was still nearly a day's journey from their bases. Bagneres was my point of direction, and I followed it on through a succession of obscure little towns, Monrejon, Lonmezon, Tarbes, and Mont Voisin; the last well deserving its name. Its site is a ravine, which it almost requires a ladder to ascend or descend. Here, however, as I left the river, I began to feel to what I had been indebted for the coolness of the road. The heat on the rising grounds was intolerable. In my English impatience to reach Bagneres before nightfall, I had braved the sun at hours when he reigns in full dominion, and was scorched to the bone for my pains. The peasantry had all hidden themselves, and were lurking under the slopes of the hills, or in their cottages, where the greater part were probably taking their siesta, as tranquilly as so many Venetian Nobilissimi. The few whom I met were as brown as Indians, and were panting under the sunbeams which had so handsomely bronzed their visages. Still, with all my determination to make my way, I found Bagneres not coming nearer; and at every new enquiry, the distance seemed actually prolonged. It was first" three good hours off."

After at least an hour's hard riding, the peasant of whom I asked the road, told me that it was at least four hours to the inn. The sun began to go down, and my impatience naturally increasing at the prospect of passing the night sub dio, in the land of wolves, and what was much more perilous, of wolf-hunters, I made a third enquiry. It was now "a little short of five hours." And yet the man was clearly not intending to perplex the unlucky stranger; for he entered into a defence of his calculation, going over it point by point, and fully satisfying, at least himself, that he was the most accurate of topographers. I rode on silent and sullen; and asking no more questions, in the fear that the next answer would make it six, and that, like the climber up a Dutch ice-hill, the more I struggled

onward, the farther I was sure to slip down.

At last, what I had so long apprehended began actually to take place; night thickened; in my eagerness to reach the town, I made a short cut. Let future travellers beware of the temptation. The short cut led me two leagues out of the right line, and when I might have been in my bed in the "Grande Hôtel," after feasting on ortolans, I was threading the meanderings of a forest path, dark as Erebus, with barriers of rock like the walls of a prison, before, behind, and round me; the dash of torrents in my ears, and, I must confess, serious misgivings in my heart that on this spot my neck was perfectly likely to be broken. To hope for extrication from this awkward dilemma before dawn, was beyond all reason. In vain I climbed every fragment of rock that I could scramble up on my hands and knees, to discover the twinkling of some cottage candle. All was gloom; every peasant was in bed at nightfall. I as vainly shouted, howled, and roared; I was answered by nothing but the echoes of the hills. My valet was useless on this occasion, as on all but where he found himself within the walls of some comfortable caffé or hôtel bien garni. He was made for an easy life; a Parisian Sybarite; and when I was angry, he was frightened. But I had soon an answerer, which I certainly had no desire to invoke. The wind returned me roar for roar; the clouds, which I had seen mustering along the west, and blazing like a bonfire in honour of the return of "bright Phoebus" after his day's journey, or, to take a higher flight, like the pile where the spirit of the dying day was winging upwards from the earth, were now rolling in huge black masses round the mountain tops, till they were undistinguishable from the solid pyramids of rock, or were distinguished only by the flashes of lightning which began to come and shoot through them in all directions, and, as I thought, were of the keenest and most malignant lustre that I had ever seen. I found that I was fairly caught; and a night of tempest must be borne as it might please the fortune that had determined on my drenching. The rain now came

down, not in showers, but in floods, as is usual in the South; and I had nothing for it but to plod my weary and very hazardous way through the midst of all the natural obstacles of a mountain country, covered with stunted forest, and intersected with runnels and rivulets, which five minutes of the rain that was now falling converted into raging and roaring torrents.

In this way I wandered on for a couple of hours, with the wet pouring from every part of my wardrobe, as if I had been wading through the ocean; my horse stumbling over trunks of trees, and starting at the flashes which blazed and crackled over my head among the forest tops, every one of which I expected to act as the conductor of the lightning on myself or my unlucky groom, whose teeth I heard chattering through all the storm. From time to time I stopped to listen, but in this there was but little comfort; for in baying, the dogs among those hills seem to have taken a lesson from their neighbours the wolves, and the resemblance is so close that at a slight distance I never could distinguish the one from the other. Two or three times I heard the long melancholy yell, between bark and howl, which the wolf gives when he is disturbed from his lair; and this night was enough to have roused every " thing of chase" in the Pyrenees. My horse disliked those yells prodigiously, and at each suddenly started, listened, and exhibited all the signs of instinctive terror. At length he refused to move a step further; and I must give myself credit for the wisdom of thinking that he had good reasons for so doing, though I could not discover them. I forbore to urge him on, and dismounting, tied him to a tree, under which I had at last made up my mind to wait until daylight.

But I was to have a taste of forest life in all its varieties. I had scarcely pitched upon a spot of comparative shelter for my very unwilling bivouac, when I heard a rustling in the thicket within a few yards of

Nothing was visible, for independently of the darkness of the hour, the underwood was as thick as could be made by a matting of branches and brambles. My groom, who had followed my example in dismounting, now ran up to me, swearing that he was on the point of being devoured, for at least a dozen of wolves had darted by him through the wood. I had already heard a sufficient number of anecdotes on the subject, to give him credence, and I began seriously to ponder on the possibility of my being only a bonne bouche to the mountain monsters, a sort of entremet to the solid feast on my pair of horses. A short sharp howl was given just behind the tree where I stood; I still saw nothing, but I fired into the copse in the direction of the sound. From the effect, I wished my pistols at the moon; I had scarcely fired, when the whole wood seemed to be alive. All was a chorus of barking, and howling. I took it for granted that I had unluckily roused a whole troop of wolves, and that I had now only to abide the consequences. Still I was not eaten. I now heard shots at a distance, and began to conceive that I had awakened some of the shepherds, who are all hunters. Still there was the chance that the new comers might be poachers, or banditti, generally convertible thieves in this part of the world, and that I might have only the alternative of the wild beast or the robber. After a period of some suspense, the sound of a horn, and the sight of a lanthorn through the trees, told me that the question would be soon settled in one way or other, and with my remaining pistol cocked, I waited for the approach of the lanthorn-bearer. He was a ferocious looking fellow, with a rifle in his hand, a couteau at his girdle, and a visage, which, between his enormous whiskers, mire, and wrath, looked strongly tending to the villanous. He was proceeding at first to lay hands on me without any ceremony; but the sight of my pistol, which quickly caught his glance, doubtless taught him the wisdom of proceeding more deliberately, and stepping back a pace or two, and eyeing me with rather more respect, he demanded my business in the

king's forest at that time of night. Fortunately I was angry enough with his first insolence to answer him in a high tone, and demanded by what authority he dared to question me? Submissiveness, as I afterwards learned, might have actually produced the violence I expected; but my language and pistol together instantly moderated the fellow's tem per: and telling me that he was one of the forest guards, he listened to my very brief account of the circum.stances I stood in. In the meantime, three or four of his comrades came up with their dogs, whose beating through the wood I had mistaken for that of the wolves. I directed them to the spot where I had fired. A track of blood showed that my ball had taken effect. The dogs were set on again; and a few hundred yards off a huge wolf was found, with his leg broken, intrenched in a bed of brambles. The dogs rushed at him, but the wolf had been too wary in his choice of ground to be assailable with any hope of success in this way. One or two of the boldest hounds came back with bleeding noses; the rifle alone was competent to conclude the affair. dogs were called off, and a volley fired among the brambles; a roar, a bound, and a long whine, gave sufficient proof that the tiraillade had taken effect. One of the gardes now went in, found the savage dead, and dragged him out in triumph. This completely turned the tables for me; the triumph of the party was my triumph too. This little piece of success put them all in good-humour. I was instantly their bon camarade, bien brave, and so forth, and invited to their headquarters. I felt no unwillingness whatever to exchange my present position for any other that offered a shelter, and proceeded with them accordingly. Their "headquarters" I found a comfortable house, where, in a few minutes after our arrival, a blazing fire was kindled to dry our clothes, and, in a few minutes more, a capital supper was smoking on the table. The forest furnished game of all kinds, and the gardes certainly had not spared the king's venison that night. We had French and Spanish wines, both of the best order, several excellent songs to sweeten the feast, a great

The

deal of good-humour, rough but kindly, and, to close all, beds fragrant with mountain flowers, on the best of which, reserved for me in peculiar honour, I slept till long after the sun was driving his wheels high over the Pyrenees.

In the morning I found my eyes opening on Bagneres. My window commanded the whole valley in which the town lay. My journal here is brief. Fine prospect. Picturesque exterior. Interior like that of all French towns-narrow, dingy, wild, and dungeon-looking. Afrescati, indispensable to the man and woman of France in every situation, where the one can play and the other can quadrille. A theatre worthy of the most theatre-loving people on earth, at least in the sense of loving the stage for its own sake, for nothing can be more squalid than its temple here. Streets unmended since the Flood-projecting roofs, which reserve every drop of rain for the head of the unfortunate who passes over the paré, and a population, eager, hungry, and watching the arrival of a traveller as crows watch a carcass; three months' fleecing of the stranger being the condition of their existence during the remaining nine months of the year. Baths throwing up vapour all day long, in which my countrymen stew themselves down from the London dimensions into pale, flabby, consumptive skeletons, memorandums of the sin of three courses, and fit only to be hung up in the museum of the Temperance Society as an eternal warning against claret and Johannesberg. The penalty of swallowing water, however, is a legitimate retort for the luxury of drinking wine in the ad libitum style of which the red noses and gouty feet of the penitents round me give such palpable evidence.

But the country surrounding this dreary place is charming. The land trends away into long valleys, covered with all kinds of fruits, trees, and herbage. Mountains of every shape and size meet the eye, perpetually giving some new aspect of light and colour as the sun moves round the clouds, to me always a fine constituent of the landscape, when in all their glory, from the neighbourhood of the hills, where like the eagles they

make their especial nests; and the powerful sunshine when the weather happens to be clear, dyes them in every hue of the rainbow. In the centre of the landscape the Pic du Midi, the Peak of the South, the Mont Blanc of this region, shoots its long shaft into the skies. It is a noble object, and if the Pyrenees were in the habit of producing heroes, might make a capital Pompey's pillar, or the monument of a much greater man-a Nelson's. It is I don't know how many thousand feet high. Its capital at the present moment is a huge grey and gold cloud. Mind the Pic to-morrow.

Travelling resolutions are always to be taken with a large allowance. On the morrow, a party of English, roving the world for wonders, came into Bagneres. The noise of their calèches brought out the idlers, who, excepting the waiters at the inns, form the whole population. We received them in front of the "Grand Hotel" with due honours, that is to say, in our dressing-gowns, white slippers, and straw hats. If they had not been accustomed to such displays, they must have taken us for a population of millers or monkeys. The party made a prodigious "effect," for they came in four large calèches, and the whole four completely full. A pile of bandboxes in front gave immediate indication that the fair sex made a principal part of the freight, and the conjecture was speedily and pleasantly realized by our handing from their carriages four of my countrywomen, to two of whom, to my great gratification, I had the advantage of being previously known. All Bagneres was alive on this arrival; for the English have of late years been rare here, and the present party were viewed as a phenomenon propitious to the hope of a new turn of affairs. Talk of England and the English as he will, the foreigner, in every corner of the innkeeping world, rejoices at the sight of their faces. And I too had my share of pride, in marching arm-in-arm with my handsome and rose-cheeked country women through the promenade of the town, to the infinite discomfiture of the native belles, whose brown cheeks, short figures, and provincial air, made a deplorable exhibition in the contrast.

They did well enough before, for they are among the best looking race in the south, and fine countenances are not unfrequent. But after the pure white and brilliant red of English beauty, no foreign complexion is tolerable. Snuff, coffeegrounds, every odious comparison, suggests itself, and even their wit and wile, rouge and black eyes, are thrown totally into the background. Every woman on whom I glanced in our walk gave me the irresistible idea of a mulatto.

I dined with the tourists, and the excursion to the Pic was talked over, and settled. The male portion of the party were the father and two brothers of the two ladies, with whom I had not the honour of a previous acquaintance, and the uncle of the two with whom I had, and who, besides, was an old shipmate of mine during many a long cruise in the Mediterranean. Thus I was perfectly at home. An Italian artist whom they patronised, and were taking with them to England to finish some decorations in one of their family mansions, and who was an intelligent and clean personage, and an old French noble of the neighbourhood, known to them during the emigration, and who, on hearing of their arrival, had driven in to give them an invitation to his chateau among the hills, completed the number. We spent a delightful day. The old noble was full of anecdote of the past and present, his pilgrimages in the day of trouble, and his adventures among the mountains, in which he was a keen and hardy hunter. Age to a Frenchman is like age to wine. It mellows him, and turns his intolerable self-love into some respect for others; trial is perhaps still better. A Frenchman never travels when he can help it. Thus he is as much overgrown with prejudices, as a ship in harbour with barnacles. France is all the globe to him; and if he happen, unluckily for himself, to be a Parisian, Paris is all France.

This puts him out of the file of companionship on all topics of rational conversation. He cannot, or will not, comprehend the constitution, habits, literature, or history, of any country that lies beyond the borders of France. Thus, I have

never found any Frenchman (except the few emigrants) who could understand a syllable concerning England. The names of our institutions ran glibly enough on their tongues; but to give the Gaul a just conception on the subject of any of them, was labour in vain. The indescribable air of self-satisfaction with which the untravelled Frenchman discusses the most intricate matters of foreign life, forms the last finish to his disqualifications as a member of general society; and the utter impossibility of convincing him that he has any thing to learn, should make every man in his company limit his topics to the coffee-house or the theatre. But our old Frenchman had been taught better things in the hard school which compels all its pupils to learn something. He had been a volunteer in the army of Conde, then an exile in America, then hospitably received in England, where he remained, scorning the offers of the brilliant government that usurped the throne of the Bourbons, and had found the reward of his persevering loyalty in sharing the restoration of Louis XVIII.

My adventure in the forest having been mentioned, the old Frenchman congratulated me on my escape, assuring us that the danger from the wolves in some seasons was serious, for though they generally waited till hunger drove them down in winter, yet frolic or fasting sometimes sent them into the valleys, where the sheep, and, unless he happened to be considerably on the alert, the shepherd himself, might be missing by morn. As to the question of domesticating the wolf, he told us that it had often been tried, by taking the whelps young; but that it was a perilous experiment at best; of which he gave an example in his own instance. Shortly after his return to France, he had shot a she-wolf in the mountains, and tracking her to her den, found her dying, with two young ones at her side. He took them away, and reared them about the chateau, like housedogs. All went on well for a time. The young animals frisked at his sight, licked his hand, followed him like his pointers, and appeared so thoroughly reconciled to the chateau, that he frequently showed them as an answer to the doubts of his neigh