Nature would seem to have specially favoured this little nook of
France, which must have been the Eden of primeval man on Gallic soil.
There he found ready-made habitations, a river abounding in fish, a
forest teeming with game; constrained periodically to descend from the
waterless plateaux, at such points as favoured a descent, to slake
their thirst at the stream, and there was the nude hunter lurking in
the scrub or behind a stone, with bow or spear awaiting his prey--his
dinner and his jacket.

What beasts did he slay? The wild horse, with huge head, was driven by
him over the edge of the precipice, and when it fell with broken limbs
or spine, was cut up with flint knives and greedily devoured. The
reindeer was also hunted, and the cumbersome mammoth enabled a whole
tribe to gorge itself.

The grottoes perforating the cliff, like bubbles in Gruyere cheese,
have been occupied consecutively to the present day. Opposite to Les
Eyzies, hanging like a net or skein of black thread to the face of the
precipice, is a hotel, part gallery, part cave--l'Auberge du Paradis;
and a notice in large capitals invites the visitor to a "Course aux
Canards."

When I was last there, reaching the tavern by a ladder erected in a
grotto, I learned that an American couple on their honeymoon had
recently slept in the guest-chamber scooped out of the living rock. The
kitchen itself is a cavern, and in it are shelves, staged against the
rock, offering Chartreuse, green and yellow, Benedictine, and Creme de
Menthe. The proprietor also possesses a gramophone, and its strident
notes we may well suppose imitate the tones of the first inhabitants of