enough to overcome such timidity, asked me if I was a _marchand_, by which
she meant pedlar--the old question to which I have grown weary of replying.
About a mile from the town I found the Dordogne again. It had grown to
quite a fine river since I last saw it in the ravines below Bort. Many an
eager affluent had rushed into it, both on the Correze and the Cantal side.
Here most of the grass was dried up, and the freshness of the highlands was
gone. Still the valley was shut in by steep cliffs. Brambles climbed about
the rocks, where the broom also flourished, although tangled with
its parasite, the dodder. Looking up the crags, I recognised a wild
fig-tree--the first I had seen on this southward journey.

The valley became again so narrow that the road was cut into the escarped
side of the cliff, for the river ran close under it. A woman with bare legs
and bare chest--really half naked--trudged by with a heavy bundle of
maize upon her head, followed by a couple of red-haired children, their
perfectly-shaped little legs browned by the sun and powdered with dust. How
beautiful are the limbs of these peasant children, however disfigured by
toil and the inherited physical blight of hardship their mother's form may
be! With each fresh generation, Nature seems to make an effort to go back
to her ideal type; but destiny is strong. Old and new causes working
together are often more than a match for that most marvellous force in all
animal and vegetable life--the love of symmetry.

Resting upon a bed of peppermint, blue with flowers, under an old wall,
whose stones were half hidden by celandine and roving briony; loitering
dreamily upon a wide waste of sunlit pebbles, watching the flashing rapids
of the river where it awoke from its calm sleep to battle with the rocks
which had resisted incalculable ages of washing, the hours glided by so
stealthily that it was evening when I reached a village which was still
eight miles or more from Beaulieu.