It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November, which are only
known in the valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace,
that two cavaliers might have been perceived by the naked eye threading
one of the rocky and romantic gorges that skirt the mountain-land
between the Marne and the Garonne. The rosy tints of the declining
luminary were gilding the peaks and crags which lined the path, through
which the horsemen wound slowly; and as these eternal battlements with
which Nature had hemmed in the ravine which our travellers trod, blushed
with the last tints of the fading sunlight, the valley below was gray
and darkling, and the hard and devious course was sombre in twilight.
A few goats, hardly visible among the peaks, were cropping the scanty
herbage here and there. The pipes of shepherds, calling in their flocks
as they trooped homewards to their mountain villages, sent up plaintive
echoes which moaned through those rocky and lonely steeps; the stars
began to glimmer in the purple heavens spread serenely overhead and
the faint crescent of the moon, which had peered for some time scarce
visible in the azure, gleamed out more brilliantly at every moment,
until it blazed as if in triumph at the sun's retreat. 'Tis a fair land
that of France, a gentle, a green, and a beautiful; the home of arts
and arms, of chivalry and romance, and (however sadly stained by the
excesses of modern times) 'twas the unbought grace of nations once, and
the seat of ancient renown and disciplined valor.

And of all that fair land of France, whose beauty is so bright and
bravery is so famous, there is no spot greener or fairer than that one
over which our travellers wended, and which stretches between the good
towns of Vendemiaire and Nivose. 'Tis common now to a hundred thousand
voyagers: the English tourist, with his chariot and his Harvey's Sauce,
and his imperials; the bustling commis-voyageur on the roof of the
rumbling diligence; the rapid malle-poste thundering over the chaussee