growing stronger, showed my host's best trousers hanging against the
whitewashed wall, and from the pigsty came indignant snorts in answer to
the deepening moan of the thunder; but the crickets of the house sang after
their fashion of the hearth and home, and those outside of the great joy of
idleness in the summer fields. From a bit of hedge or old wall came now and
then the clear note of a fairy-bell rung by a goblin toad.

I lit the candle again, and elfish moths, with specks of burning charcoal
for eyes, dashed at me or whirled and spun about the flame. One was a most
delicately-beautiful small creature, with long white wings stained with
pink. Thus I spent the night, looking at the sights and listening to the
sounds of nature; which is better than to lie with closed eyes quarrelling
with one's own brain.

We left with a boy carrying a basket of grapes and peaches, also wine to
refill the empty bottles in the boat. On my way down the hill, I stopped
at the ruin of a mediaeval castle that belonged to Poltrot de Mere, the
assassin of the Due de Guise. All this country of the Angoumois, even
more than Perigord, is full of the history of the religious wars of the
sixteenth century. The whole of the southwestern region of France might be
termed the classic ground of atrocities committed in the name of religion.
Simon de Montfort's Crusaders and the Albigenses, after them the Huguenots
and the Leaguers, have so thickly sown this land with the seed of blood,
to bear witness through all time to their merciless savagery, that the
unprejudiced mind, looking here for traces of a grand struggle of ideals,
will find little or nothing but the records of revolting brutality.

There is nothing left of Poltrot de Mere's stronghold but a few fragments
of wall much overgrown with ivy and brambles. In order to get a close view
of these I had to ask permission of the owner of the land--an elderly man,