southerly extension of the Grand Tour. A proposition to exploit them
meets a dubious reception. Pictures arise of desolate gorges; of lonely
roads and dangerous trails; of dismal roadside inns, where, when you
halt for the night, a "repulsive-looking landlord receives the unhappy
man, exchanges a look of ferocious intelligence with the driver,"--and
the usual melodramatic midnight carnage probably ensues. The Pyrenees
seem to echo the motto of their old counts, "_Touches-y, si tu l'oses_!"
the name seems to stand vaguely for untested discomforts, for clouds and
chasms, and Spanish banditti in blood-red _capas_; to be, in a word, a
symbol of an undiscovered country which would but doubtfully reward a
resolve to discover.

Yet there is a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour.
There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose
shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven
thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage
scenery,--ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and
streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over
the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely
tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of
country,--a people with whom, "to be a Béarnais is greater than to be a
Frenchman."

To visit the Pyrenees, too, will be almost to live again in the Middle
Ages. The Roman, the Moor, the Paladin, Froissart, Henry of Navarre,
have marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys
have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring
biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a
nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediæval adventure.
One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the