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So run on the Landes, mile after mile, station after station, varied only by an occasional stunted cork tree, or a starved field of barley or maize. But the railroad is bringing to them, as elsewhere, labour, civilization, agricultural improvement. Pretty villages, orchards, gardens, are springing up round the lonely ‘gares.’ The late Emperor helped forward, it is said, new pine plantations, and sundry schemes for reclaiming the waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringed lagoon of the Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oyster breeding, and is rising into a gay watering-place, with a distinguished scientific society. Nay, more: it saw a few years since an international exposition of fish, and fish-culture, and fishing-tackle, and all things connected with the fisheries, not only of Europe, but of America likewise. Heaven speed the plan; and restore thereby oysters to our shores, and shad and salmon to the rivers both of Western Europe and Eastern North America.

As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily divined, by the help of a map and of common sense.

The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the drainage of nearly a third of France, including almost all the rain which falls on the north side of the Pyrenees. What has become of all the sand and mud which has been swept in the course of ages down their channels? What has become–a very small part, be it recollected, of the whole amount–of all the rock which has been removed by rain and thunder, frost and snow, in the process of scooping out the deep valleys of the Pyrenees? Out of that one crack, which men call the Val d’Ossau, stone has been swept enough to form a considerable island. Where is it all? In these Landes. Carried down year by year to the Atlantic, it has been driven back again, year by year, by the fierce gales of the Bay of Biscay, and rolled up into banks and dunes of loose sand, till it has filled up what was once a broad estuary, 140 miles across and perhaps 70 miles in depth. Upheaved it may have been also, slowly, from the sea, for recent sea-shells are found as far inland as Dax; and thus the whole upper end of the Bay of Biscay has transformed itself during the lapse of, it may be, countless ages, into a desolate wilderness.

It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead of running north for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, turn south-east to Orthez and Pau, and the Gaves, and the Pyrenees.

And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody and moorish, with the long yellow maize-stalks of last year’s crop rotting in the swampy glens. For the ‘petite culture,’ whatever be its advantages, gives no capital or power of combined action for draining wet lands; and the valleys of Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as great sheets of the Pas de Calais in the north, are in a waterlogged state, equally shocking to the eye of a British farmer, and injurious to the health and to the crops of the peasants.

Soon we strike the Adour, here of the shape and size of a second- class Scotch salmon-stream, with swirling brown pools beneath grey crags, which make one long to try in them the virtues of ‘Jock Scott,’ ‘the Butcher,’ or the ‘Dusty Miller.’ And perhaps not without effect; for salmon are there still; and will be more and more as French ‘pisciculture’ develops itself under Government supervision.

Here we touch again the line of that masterly retreat of Soult’s before the superior forces of Wellington, to which Napier has done such ample and deserved justice.

There is Berenz, where the Sixth and Light divisions crossed the Gave, and clambered into the high road up steep ravines; and there is Orthez itself, with the beautiful old Gothic bridge which the French could not blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat; and the ruins of that robber den to which Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix (of whom you may read in Froissart), used to drag his victims; and there overhead, upon the left of the rail and road, is the old Roman camp, and the hill of Orthez, and St. Boes, and the High Church of Baights, the scene of the terrible battle of Orthez.