undermined incessantly by the rippling Loire at their feet, for a
perpetual wonder for spectators. The village of Vouvray nestles, as it
were, among the clefts and crannies of the crags, which begin to
describe a bend at the junction of the Loire and Cise. A whole
population of vine-dressers lives, in fact, in appalling insecurity in
holes in their jagged sides for the whole way between Vouvray and
Tours. In some places there are three tiers of dwellings hollowed out,
one above the other, in the rock, each row communicating with the next
by dizzy staircases cut likewise in the face of the cliff. A little
girl in a short red petticoat runs out into her garden on the roof of
another dwelling; you can watch a wreath of hearth-smoke curling up
among the shoots and trails of the vines. Men are at work in their
almost perpendicular patches of ground, an old woman sits tranquilly
spinning under a blossoming almond tree on a crumbling mass of rock,
and smiles down on the dismay of the travelers far below her feet. The
cracks in the ground trouble her as little as the precarious state of
the old wall, a pendant mass of loose stones, only kept in position by
the crooked stems of its ivy mantle. The sound of coopers' mallets
rings through the skyey caves; for here, where Nature stints human
industry of soil, the soil is everywhere tilled, and everywhere
fertile.

No view along the whole course of the Loire can compare with the rich
landscape of Touraine, here outspread beneath the traveler's eyes. The
triple picture, thus barely sketched in outline, is one of those
scenes which the imagination engraves for ever upon the memory; let a
poet fall under its charm, and he shall be haunted by visions which
shall reproduce its romantic loveliness out of the vague substance of
dreams.