I must leave all these interesting features of Toulouse and hasten up into the Black Mountains, a few miles away, where I saw the country life of modern Languedoc.
At Jacournassy, the country seat of Mme.

Berry, whose daughter my son Theodore married, I spent a month full of surprises.

How everything differed from America, and even from the plain below! The peasants, many of them at least, can neither speak French nor understand it.

Their language is a patois, resembling both Spanish and Italian, and they cling to it with astonishing pertinacity.

Their agricultural implements are not less quaint than their speech.