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And so you go to rest, content to say, with the wise American, ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’

The next morn you rise, to roll on over yet more weary uplands to Montrejeau, over long miles of sandy heath, a magnified Aldershott, which during certain summer months is gay, here and there, like Aldershott, with the tents of an army at play. But in spring the desolation is utter, and the loneliest grouse-moor, and the boggiest burn, are more cheerful and varied than the Landes of Lannemezan, and the foul streamlets which have sawn gorges through the sandy waste.

But all the while, on your right hand, league after league, ever fading into blue sky behind you, and growing afresh out of blue sky in front, hangs high in air the white saw of the Pyrenees. High, I say, in air, for the land slopes, or seems to slope, down from you to the mountain range, and all their roots are lost in a dim sea of purple haze. But shut out the snow line above, and you will find that the seeming haze is none, but really a clear and richly varied distance of hills, and woods, and towns, which have become invisible from the contrast of their greens, and greys, and purples, with the glare and dazzle of the spotless snows of spring.

There they stand, one straight continuous jagged wall, of which no one point seems higher than another. From the Pic d’Ossau, by the Mont Perdu and the Maladetta to the Pic de Lart, are peaks past counting–hard clear white against the hard clear blue, and blazing with keen light beneath the high southern sun. Each peak carries its little pet cushion of cloud, hanging motionless a few hundred yards above in the blue sky, a row of them as far as eye can see. But, ever and anon, as afternoon draws on, one of those little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its post ever since sunrise, loses its temper, boils, swells, settles down on its own private peak, and explodes in a fierce thunderstorm down its own private valley, without discomposing in the least its neighbour cloud-cushions right and left. Faintly the roll of the thunder reaches the ear. Across some great blackness of cloud and cliff, a tiny spark darts down. A long wisp of mist sweeps rapidly toward you across the lowlands, and a momentary brush of cold rain lays the dust. And then the pageant is played out, and the disturbed peak is left clear again in the blue sky for the rest of the day, to gather another cloud-cushion when to- morrow’s sun shall rise.

To him who looks, day after day, on this astonishing natural wall, stretching, without visible gap, for nearly three hundred miles, it is easy to see why France not only is, but must be, a different world from Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any useful extent, fly over that great wall of homeless rock and snow. On the other side there must needs be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, other polities, and if not another creed, yet surely with other, and utterly different, conceptions of the universe, and of man’s business therein. Railroads may do somewhat. But what of one railroad; or even of two, one on the ocean, one on the sea, two hundred and seventy miles apart? Before French civilization can inform and elevate the Spanish people you must ‘plane down the Pyrenees.’

At Montrejeau, a pretty town upon a hill which overhangs the Garonne, you find, again, verdure and a railroad; and, turning your back upon the Pyrenees, run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through crops of exceeding richness–wheat, which is reaped in July, to be followed by buckwheat reaped in October; then by green crops to be cut in May, and that again by maize, to be pulled in October, and followed by wheat and the same rotation.