later period, became so general in Europe.

The monthly fair at Figeac offers some curious pictures of rural life.
The peasants crowd in from the valleys and the surrounding _causses_.
Racial differences, or those produced by the influences of soil and
food--especially water--for a long series of generations, are very
strongly marked. There is the florid, robust, blue-eyed, sanguine
type, and there is the leaden-coloured, black-haired, lantern-jawed,
sloping-shouldered, and hollow-chested type. Then there are the
intermediates. Considered generally, these peasants of the Haut-Quercy
are not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very
often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their
excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from
cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this
physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the
main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the
force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair,
where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying.
Their canon of morality there is that everyone must look after
himself. I have been assured by a priest that they never think of
confessing the lies that they tell in bartering, because they maintain
that every man who buys ought to understand his business. I much
wondered why, at a Figeac fair, when there was a question of buying a
bullock, the animal's tail was pulled as though all his virtue were
concentrated in this appendage. I learnt that the reason of the
tugging was this: Cattle are liable to a disease that causes the tail
to drop off, but the people here have discovered a very artful trick
of fastening it on again, and it needs a vigorous pull to expose the
fraud. Among other tricks of the country is that of drenching an
ill-tempered and unmanageable horse with two _litres_ of wine before