been planted with Jerusalem artichokes, each of which had now its yellow
head that tells its relationship to the sunflower. These artichokes are
much grown by damp woodsides, and on other land of little value, in the
valleys of Perigord. They are rarely used as food for man, for the French,
notwithstanding the wide range of their gastronomy, including as it does
squirrels and tomtits, and even snakes in certain localities, as well as
various herbs and vegetables seldom or never eaten in England, have not
been able to acquire a liking for the tubers of the artichoke. The plant
is cultivated for feeding cattle, the whole of it doing good service in a
region where there is but little grass. The multitude of golden flowers
floating, as it were, on sombre green waves light up the autumnal landscape
with a new flame when the skies turn gray.

A solitary man whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the
river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other
bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself--now
under a gray sky--on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had
almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder
covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water
scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the
gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what
gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of
great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted
boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of
fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and the
Virgilian muse:

'Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae.'

And the sad solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or