shrimps and Broadstairs flounders, they may
eat barbels from the Loiret and salmon from
the Loire.

The great delight of arriving at Orleans
(except, perhaps, the anticipation of eating
genuine plums in a preserved —should
the season forbid a recent —condition) is
consciousness of having escaped from the
half-dozen negatives of the Beauceron
wilderness. At Orleans there are vines, and
promising ones too; a single stem left to a
single stool about the height of a raspberry-
cane. These slight peculiarities of training
are worthy of note. Remember, we are now
entering a district almost unthought of in
England, which sends forth, in tolerable
seasons, incredible supplies of excellent wine.
On descending, as they call it, at your inn at
Orleans, only call for a bottle of white
Beaugency, and if your landlord treats
you well, you will find it delicious. I put white
Beaugency in italics, because there are white
French wines and yellow wines. The distinction
is striking to the eye, and might be
made to enter into common conversation,
without exposing the innovator to a just
charge of affectation. Some of the wines of
the Orleannais and the Touraine have a
peculiar Irish whiskeyfied taste (to my own
palate), as if the bottles had had a whiff of
smoke puffed into them; sometimes it varies
to a kind of aromatic, cocoa-nutty flavour.
But their great merit, in the merchant's
eyes, is their versatility; the number of
characters they are able to assume; the wide
range of parts in their répertoire. Vouvray,
near Tours, is quite celebrated for its
champagne. You may drink madeira which has
never crossed the sea, and sherry which
knows nothing of the south side of the
Pyrenees. All these are spoken of with as
little reserve as a London pastrycook would
employ in mentioning mock turtle. It may
be believed that when the wines of the
Loire once reach Bercy and the Entrepôt de
Vins at Paris, they are made to represent by
turns the growth of every known and
unknown vineyard. Their fundamental excellence,
which enables them to manifest such
varied talent, arises from the same cause
which gives the Rhine wines their strength
and keeping qualities —namely, that where
the best samples are produced, the river
flows from east to west. It makes no difference
that, in the analogous case, the Rhine
flows from west to east —from Bingen to
Mayence. The grand consequence is, that
the northern bank of either stream lies
fully exposed to the noontide sun.

The principal lions of Orleans are the
cathedral and the Loire, with its one stone
bridge over it. It would not be reasonable
to ask for more than one to span such an
inundative shingle-sweeping stream; the railway,
however, has contrived for itself a second viaduct.
The first conducts you to an ill-kept
botanic garden (for which I should blush celestial
rosy red, as Milton says, were I the director),
open to the public on Mondays and Thursdays.
The only things there worth looking
at were not botanic —some silky-feathered
Cochin China fowls. As a set-off, at Orleans
there are public and gratuitous lectures, and
lessons in the art of pruning and grafting
fruit trees, created, to borrow the indigenous
phrase, by the department and the town in
partnership.

The Orleans folk (and the same remark
applies as you travel southwards) smoke a
considerably less amount of the weed than is
consumed in the northern departments of
France, especially in those which are
contiguous to the Belgian and the Prussian
frontiers. There you may see even quite
young men with a little round hole worn in
the teeth on each side of the jaw, simply by
the wear and tear caused by constantly holding
a short clay pipe in the mouth. The
Orleannais and Touraine women, besides
carrying flat baskets on their heads, are also
fond of surmounting their noddles with caps
shaped like sewing-thimbles. While looking
at them, I could not drive from my mind the
punishment administered in dame-schools
called thimble-pie. More pleasing objects
were the handsome carriages and well-dressed
people who frequent the streets. The grocers'
shops filled with stores of dried plums in
great variety, besides pears and figs, are
cheering to beholders gifted with a sweet
tooth, as are also the confectioners' windows.
Savoury condiments are seen in the market,
in the guise of burnt turnips and flat-baked
onions, to give colour and flavour to the pot-
à-feu. Glance respectfully at the hôtels of
the noblesse, with their lofty portes-cochères
and their dull, dull walled-in courts, lighted
with oil réverbères, and wonder that people
whose names begin with De should permit
such abominable faults in orthography as are
to be seen on the posters pasted up against
their walls and even painted on the corners
of their streets.

Off to Blois in double-quick time! The
banks of the Loire, as seen from the railway,
do not correspond to De Balzac's eulogies;
those of the Seine are infinitely prettier; and
everywhere, as you rattle along, you have
evidences that the Loire is a mischievous
stream,—a passionate person who now and
then loses all self-control,—a temporary
maniac, with lucid intervals, during which he
is sorry for the injury he has done to his
friends and neighbours. He buries them
beneath beds of shingle, sand, and gravel; he
drowns them under a rushing cataract, and
sweeps all their goods and chattels away;
and then, by-and-by, he disfigures the
landscape by displaying an empty bed, with more
grey stones than water exposed to view.
His natural guardians try to keep him within
bounds by a sort of double-straight-jacket,
called a levée. But the levées raised on each
side of the Loire do not improve the beauty