yourself, is asleep. The houses are so built that wherever you may
take refuge you are compelled to hear the conversation that is going
on in any part of them. In the South the necessity of listening
becomes really terrible. The men roar, and the women shriek, in their
ordinary talk. A complete stranger to such ways might easily suppose
that they were engaged in a wordy battle of alarming ferocity, when
they are merely discussing the pig's measles, or the case of a cow
that strayed into a field of lucern, and was found the next morning
like a balloon. It is hard for a person who needs to be quiet at times
to live with such people without giving the Recording Angel a great
deal of disagreeable work.

I would not have believed that so small a place as Roc-Amadour, and
such a holy one, could have been so noisy if my own experience had not
informed me on this subject. Every morning at five the tailor who did
duty as policeman and crier came with his drum, and, stationing
himself by the town pump, which was just in front of my cottage, awoke
the echoes of the gorge with a long and furious _tambourinade_. While
the women, in answer to this signal, were coming from all directions,
carrying buckets in their hands, or copper water-pots on their heads,
he unchained the pump-handle. Now for the next two hours the strident
cries of the exasperated pump, and the screaming gabble of many
tongues, all refreshed by slumber and eager for exercise, made such a
diabolic tumult and discord as to throw even the braying of the
donkeys into the minor key. Of course, sleep under such circumstances
would have been miraculous; but, then, no one had any right to sleep
when the rocks were breaking again into flame, and the mists which
filled the gorge by night were folding up their tents. I therefore
accepted this noise as if it had been intended for my good, and the
crowd in front of the pump was always an amusing picture of human