laughter, but still remaining as voiceless as before, they dashed their torches against the walls, and completely extinguished them, leaving Sir Wigolais once more in the dark, to reflect on the pleasing sights he had witnessed.

A bang on the head, similar in force to that which he had endured from the earthen pot, first aroused him from his meditations. He returned the blow, and struck something like armour, when another bang came upon his helmet. This combat in the dark continued for some minutes, when at last Sir Wigolais felt something yield to his sword, and then heard it fall with a heavy clang to the ground. At the same time the room became illuminated with a blue light, and he saw a number of fiends, bearing a headless body through a cavity in the floor, while the sightless damsels ran round and round the apartment, clapping their hands, and moving their mouths, as if shrieking with despair, though still without giving any sound. Presently the whole castle fell in with a crash, and Sir Wigolais found himself in a beautiful garden. The souls of the slain knights fluttered about his head in their dove-like form; the shade of the murdered monarch, who sat near him on a glittering throne, smiled on him benignantly, and the voice, which had spoken from behind the cloud, now said, in milder tones: "The reign of enchantment is over; the hateful Roas has received the punishment due to his crimes, and Wigolais is the bridegroom of Laria, and sovereign of the fair land of Corotin."

A WALK IN THE LANDES OF BORDEAUX.

BY W. FRANCIS AINSWORTH, ESQ.

Territory of the "Vins de Grave"-The Landes-Aquitanian Celts-La Teste de Buch-Anecdotes of Jean de Grailly-Descent of Henry IV. from the Captals of Buch-Basin of Arcachon-A Night on the Downs-La Biscarosse-Lagoons and Quicksands-Extinct Port of Mimizan-The Pinadas-Couzeots-St. Julien-A Cagot-St. Leon-Vieux Boucau-Vineyards of the Landes-Cape Breton-The Marensin-Bayonne.,

WHEN at Bordeaux, now some time back, on my way to the Pyrenees, I took a fancy to explore the Landes more intimately than was generally done by passing travellers. I was aware of certain general facts-of extensive heaths, dark pine forests, a remote, uncouth population, shepherds on stilts, and vast regions of sands-and this was quite sufficient to excite a wish to see such things a little more closely. Add to which there was something exciting in the idea of a wilderness. It was a change from the formal parallelogramism of cultivated fields and hedge rows, and a still greater relief from the monotony of cities, avenues of trees, and town entrances. Who has travelled much and has not sometimes felt that so many humble shops, so many more ambitious gable ends, and a few towering ricketty steeples, belong to all town entrances?

But in the days I now speak of it was a more difficult matter to get to the Landes than it is at present, when railway carriages convey about

two travellers per day to the Bassin d'Arcachon. The highway from Bordeaux to Bayonne makes an especial curve inwards to avoid the Landes and yet many who have thus only contemplated these great plains from their periphery, have deemed themselves qualified to speak in ecstasies of their boundless expanse and their unexplored recesses. Inquiries of a very limited extent soon satisfied me, that to see the "Landes" the only plan was to send on my portmanteau to Bayonne, and to place my reliance simply on a well shod and resolute foot. And what was it? A walk of exactly 100 miles as the crow would fly. It might be 150 with deviations. This was nothing to one who had performed the "short" and "long" tours in Scotland, in humble peripatetic fashion.

Full of my object, yet little prepared for the mishaps which were to attend upon me almost at the onset, I started one fine morning guided solely by the compass, and as lightly equipped as possible. Those only who are accustomed and partial to foot travel,-not a saunter along a highway dotted with pictures and other artistical insignia of places of refuge and refreshment, but across-country, in unfamiliar lands, and with the horizon as a prospect,-can enter into the feelings experienced on emerging from the crowd and bustle of a great city into the open country, without a restriction upon the will. Time is now your own. You have no coach, nor horse, nor sullen guide to attend to. Means are also your own. Your feet tread the springy turf as if incapable of fatigue. There is a buoyancy that almost communicates to the frame the lightness of a bird, and is so utterly at variance with gravity, that you find yourself involuntarily engaged in a hop, skip and jump progress, which ends in knocking off the heads of a harmless clump of thistles with the end of the sole companion of your journey-your favourite stick.

The sands and gravel (tertiary arenaceous deposit), which constitute the soil of the Landes, extend from the banks of the Garonne to those of the Adour, so that in reality the traveller is no sooner out of Bordeaux than he is in the Landes; but for some little distance he still meets with cultivation, and more especially those vineyards which afford the wines called les vins de Grave from their growing on les terrains graveleux. The Bordelais consider their wines according as they grow on strong soil without gravel,-which is the case both in high and low Medoc for an extent of nearly twenty leagues, on the alluvium of the river (vins de Palus), or on the gravel (vins de Grave). The vins de Palus have more body and colour than the others, and are often used to give body to the inferior wines of Medoc, not to the Lafitte, Latour, and Chateau-Margaux, which are in the high Medoc, but to wines of the lower Medoc, and they are also preferred for long journeys. At the time I am now speaking the "clos" of Larose, now so fashionable in the canton of Pauillac was only esteemed as a second claret, but the travail à l'Anglaise, as they call it in the country, can effect great changes.*

But to my gravelly wines. The red are produced by the varieties of grape called Carmenet, Verdot, Tarnex, Malbek and Balouzat. They possess deeper colour and greater strength than those of Medoc, but

The travail à l'Anglaise consists in allowing a second fermentation to take place, the year after the harvest, which is effected by adding to every barrel about eighteen pots of Alicant or of Benicarlo, one pot of vin blanc muet,-wine the fermentation of which has been arrested by sulphurous vapours-and a bottle of spirit of wine.-Manuel du Sommelier. Par A. Jullien.

less bouquet or flavour. The white wines are the produce of the Sauvignon, Blanc-doux, Semilion, Cruchinet, Verdelette, and Chalosse. The Haut Brion is the only first class red vin de Grave; it ranked some years back with the Lafitte, Latour and Chateau-Margaux, as one of the four first class clarets, and was by many preferred over all others for its superior body, roughness, and aroma. It, however, required seven years in the chais or cellars before it attained maturity, whereas the other three only required five. The white vins de Grave have a dry taste, and a flavour which has been compared to the odour of cloves and of a gun flint! The Sauternes and Barsac are the best known, but they are gathered upon a particular principle. There are also several distinct vineyards attached both to Sauternes and to Barsac.

The

The district called de Grave extends for many leagues in some directions, but in that which I was following I was out of the boundary of cultivation, and upon the open heath after about an hour's walk. first day's progress did not present much that was very striking. The eye wandered over a great monotonous waste, only interrupted here and there by a cottage or two surrounded by a few fields of maize or millet, or an occasional oxen cart, wending its way over the pathless heath. There were as yet no shepherds to be seen mounted on stilts, but there was the grandeur of solitude and expanse, and the impression was by no means of a feeble or uninspiring character.

"The Landes," says M. Theophile Gautier, "are immense sheets of gray, violet, bluish land, with more or less distinct undulations. A short and rare moss, ruddy heaths, and stunted brooms, form the only vegetation. It is the sorrowfulness of the Egyptian Thebiad, and every minute one expects to see dromedaries and camels defile; one would say that man had never passed that way."

This is much more poetical than exact. The soil of the Landes, generally sandy, is certainly variously coloured, chiefly from the presence of numerous mosses and lichens. During four months of the year these plains are in part covered with water, which collects in the hollows, forming shallows (mares) of little depth, which in the summer are covered with short grass. These collections of water are sometimes so great as to give rise to streams, which work deep furrows in the sand, laying bare the roots and carrying away the shrubby plants, and leaving beds of white micaceous sand behind them.

The sterility of the Landes appears to be in main part owing to a hard and compact bed (called alios by the natives) of a dark brown colour, from some inches to several feet in thickness, formed by a quartzose sand, bound by a cement, in which iron oftentimes exists in so great a quantity that it has been wrought for with various success, and in the time of Napoleon upon a large scale.

It is a curious fact that our distinguished countryman, Arthur Young, not only pointed out that the growth of trees on the Landes showed a moist bottom, but also that there was a bed of marl or clay under all the country. The opinion that the soil is so very bad, that all the money spent would be sure to be lost, originated, this experienced observer relates, in a M. Rollier of Bordeaux having made a trial of cultivating them, and succeeded very ill. "I guessed how such improvements had been attempted, and told my informants what I supposed had been done; and my guess proved exactly right: corn-corn-corn-corn; and then the

land pronounced good for nothing. It does not signify telling such people that the great object in all improvement of wastes are cattle, and sheep, and grass, after which corn will be sure. Nothing of this kind is comprehended from one end of France to the other."

Modern research has shown that the sandy soil of the Landes belonging to the upper marine formation and lying on quartzose, iron-stone, sands, and shelly marles, also further reposes on coarse limestone (calcaire grossier), beneath which again are the molasses and marles of the first tertiary arenaceous formation, all alike deposited on a chalk bottom, or rather with the alluvium of the river beds, the fresh water deposits of the lagunas and the vast sand floods filling up a basin in the chalk.

The vegetation of the Landes presents much greater variety and much more to interest one than would be at first imagined. It is not all, as Arthur Young described it, dwarf furze, broom, whins, ling, and fern. The principal heath, the most characteristic plant of all, is a novelty to an Englishman's eyes-at least it does not grow wild in this country except in Cornwall-the Erica Ciliaris, and it is one of the prettiest among European species. There are two kinds of broom properly 30-called (Spartium), the Retama de escobas of the Spaniards, and three of what are also called broom (Genista), the Jenista of the Iberians. There are also the beautiful and fragrant trailing Daphne (D. Cneorum); the pretty umbelled squill; a curious representative of the genus rather rudely designated as Silene by botanists, because generally covered with slaver, like the drunken god; the scarlet fumitory, saw-wort, flax, garlic, rest-harrow, a lanceolate leaved violet, and a variety of vetches, vetchlings, tares, and bird's foot. Then again among all these pretty flowers an infinite variety of insects are seen running or flitting about, none more curious than the praying Mantis or the Phasma Rossii-vagaries of an exhaustless nature-which are by no means uncommon on these sunny plains.

The occasional waggons that are met with drawn by oxen have a truly Homeric and primitive aspect. The oxen are harnessed by the head to a common yoke, decorated with a coverlet of sheep-skin; they have a look of gravity and resignation, that is quite sculptural and worthy of the bas-reliefs of Egina. The generality of them, also, wear a caparison of white linen, which preserves them from flies; and nothing is more amusing than to see these great creatures in their shirts raise their moist muzzles towards you and stare with those great blue eyes, which the Greeks, so sensitive to beauty, admired so much as to make of them the sacramental epithet of Juno: Boopis Erè.

The sun-burnt, hatchet-faced waggoner, who disturbs the exchanged looks of admiration on your part, and wonder on that of the oxen, by a poke with a long and pointed stick, and the lonely shepherd, who rests so listlessly upon another, as he continues his long and weary watch from some heath-clad monticule, without vouchsafing to turn his body round, are the only human beings met with on crossing these plains. Yet, in olden time, we are told, that a race of strangers, the Vivisci, or Vibisci, sprung from the Celtic tribe of Bituriges, dwelt on these wildernesses.

Hæc ego, Vivisca ducens ab origine gentem,

says Ausonius, the Burdigalensian poet and prefect of the fourth century, in the 438th verse of his "Mosella," and the said Celts lived, Cellarius tells us, "in Angulo, quem Garumna cum Oceano facit," and

what is equally curious, these Celts had, according to Ptolemy, a city called Noviomagum on the sea-side, the fifth of that name, one of which, ten Roman miles on the road from London, to where dwelt the Rutupian robber, also sung by Ausonius, gave its name to a well-known prandial club of learned and bibulous antiquarians. The fierce Bituriges, who, according to Cæsar, burnt twenty cities to deprive the Romans of food and refreshment, are now gone without a trace from these desert regions; whether their blood still mingles with that of the people of the ci-devant province of Berry (now Cher-et-Indre), must be left to ethnologists to determine.

It was not with me, as with the above-quoted poet of Bordeaux, to whom his horoscope promised all kinds of good luck and fortune; perhaps because I had no maternal grandfather, with a high-sounding name, like Cæcilius Argicius Arborius, skilled in judicial astrology, to erect a scheme of my nativity, and by promising advancement to ensure the accomplishment of the prediction. Certain it is, I became so buried in musings as evening crept on, that night overtook me without a cottage in sight, at the same time that the dreary inhospitable moor began to arouse a sense of considerable discomfort. That feeling, however, was shortly relieved by a twinkling light, which was immediately converted into a beacon to which to proceed au pas accéleré. Nor did a churly welcome await me. The first momentary hesitation at the intrusion of a stranger over, and a chair, such as it was, was tendered. The inquiries gradually instituted with regard to the state of the larder were not so successful. Flesh or fowl there was none. "But," said the hostess, with a smile of considerable self-satisfaction, "I can make you a petitesoupe." Accordingly, in a very brief time, a purely provincial mess was laid before me, principally composed of the seeds of bird's foot (Dolichos unguiculatus), cabbage, turnips, and a little pork. The Gascons, curiously enough, resemble the Chinese and Japanese in the use of the above seeds. The Kitjap and Tau hu of the former, and the Soja of the latter, being chiefly composed of seeds of Dolichos. It was homely fare, but the peasants were so civil, that it was impossible not to be satisfied. had ordained bird's foot soup for supper, and a grabat for a bed—but of the last the less said the better.

Fate

The very earliest dawn saw me once more on my way; this time round the easterly end of the Bassin d'Arcachon. A dense fog limited the prospect to within a few yards, and the copious mist had so bedewed the deep ling and fern, that in less than half-an-hour I was as wet as if I had been walking through the basin itself. As the day advanced, a powerful sun broke through the fog, and I smoked and dried away like all the other surrounding objects. As I stole round the south-easterly end of the basin, I got involved in marsh and forest, in the midst of which I at length discovered a corduroy road; but as such roads are proverbially bad for man or horse, several awkward steps added mud to where there had only been previously wet.

A quiet, cleanly, and well-provided, albeit, rustic hostelry at La Tête, or Teste (as it is more properly written) de Buch, fully rewarded me for these first little mishaps. I had a French déjeuner and an English lunch rolled into one, only the landlady expressed exceeding, and I thought uncalled-for, indignation at my inquiries after some of the finny tribes for which the Bassin d'Arcachon is renowned. "Imagine," she said, turning