Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/427

3, 1863.] thickly planted with poplars and fruit trees. The grasshoppers chirped in the grass, and troops of brown butterflies, and a few blue ones of the species common where marjorum abounds, flitted around me, while the breeze passing through the large walnut trees which shaded the road, and studded the fields around, was delightfully aromatic. Clematis grew in the hedges, and I gathered a bouquet of that and wild mint, and marjorum and walnut leaves; and when I grew tired smelt it, and was refreshed, and thought the lovely trailing plant so pretty, whether in flower or in feathery seed, was rightly named “Traveller’s Joy.” On my right were many little plantations, chiefly of evergreen oak, and on the left, amid the meadows, two old castellated châteaux, whose names I forget. Just where the road divided I saw a peasant shaking down plums, and asked the way to Rou, which he pointed out. There was nothing interesting in the village, except that its style of architecture was unmistakeably French. Nowhere in England do we see those steep high-pitched roofs, projecting garret-windows, persiennes, and ledges and corners that are indescribable, but which give variety and picturesqueness to the most tumble-down grenier. Nothing strikes an English person so much as the absence of life in the fields. In all this long walk, I saw no birds but two magpies, and scarcely any human beings. On the railways it was the same. We travelled miles without seeing a single person. Two Frenchmen, one a priest, the other a farmer, noticed this to me and commented on it sadly, asking me if it was the same with us. I answered, “England was over-populated, labour was so plentiful that the market was over-stocked, and our labourers in some counties could scarcely earn dry bread for themselves and their families.” A true and most lamentable fact.

“Ah! but,” said the priest, almost in the language of Goldsmith—“Le peuple fait la richesse d’un pays. Here the number of inhabitants diminishes yearly. There are not above two-thirds of the population in my village that there were twenty years ago.”

“There are not near two-thirds of what there were twenty years ago where I come from,” responded the farmer.

I asked how it was—and was told partly because the young people went to the towns; partly because French families wished only for one child, that that one might be rich. I passed through Rou without seeing a living soul—only some large dogs barking furiously rushed out from a farm-yard, which my dog with his usual impertinence had entered, but no one followed to see at what they barked. I was tired and thirsty and saw no sign of a village inn. At last I spied an old woman with a pail in her hand, in a yard. I opened the gate and asked if there was a Cabaret in Rou. “Non, ils n’y avont pas.” Could she give me any milk? Yes, if I would go to the cave. To the cave, I went; she first shewed me all the pots (which stood on the ground) were very clean, and then gave me one full of warm new milk from her pail, and I pulled out some bread from my bag, sat down on a large stone that happened to be in the cave, and ate my dinner, and looked round. The cellar had no aperture but the door,—its floor was of earth, and in the middle stood about twenty grey blue-rimmed jugs, nearly four inches thick—similar to that in my hand, which I found rather difficult to drink from, since its edge was far thicker than