source, and represented really something like half the time necessary
for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of
half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in
person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind
with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but
assured us each time we returned to the charge--about every quarter of
an hour--that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to
the source, the way led us through such pleasant scenery and such
acceptable strawberries, that we only kept up our periodical
remonstrances on principle, and, after we had wound rapidly down
through a grand defile, and turned a sudden angle of the rock, the
first sight of that which we had come to see amply repaid us all the
trouble we had gone through. The source of the Orbe is sufficiently
striking, but the Loue is by far more grand at the moment of its
birth. The former is a bright fairy-like stream, gushing out of a
small cavern at the foot of a lofty precipice clothed with clinging
trees; but the Loue flows out from the bottom of an amphitheatrical
rock much more lofty and unbroken. The stream itself is broader and
deeper, and glides with an infinitely more majestic calmness from a
vast archway in the rock, into the recesses of which the eye can
penetrate to the point where the roof closes in upon the water, and so
cuts off all further view. The calmness of the flow may be in part
attributed to a weir, which has been built across the stream at the
mouth of the cave, for the purpose of driving a portion of the water
into a channel which conveys it to various mill-wheels; for, at a very
short distance below the weir, the natural stream makes a fall of 17
feet, so that, if left to itself, it might probably rush out more
impetuously from its mysterious cavern. The weir is a single timber,
below the surface, fixed obliquely across the stream on a shelving
bank of masonry, and the farther end meets the wall of rock inside the