It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November, which are only known in the valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace, that two cavaliers might have been perceived by the naked eye threading one of the rocky and romantic gorges¹ that skirt the mountain-land between the Marne and the Garonne. The rosy² tints³ of the declining luminary⁴ were gilding⁵ the peaks and crags which lined the path, through which the horsemen wound slowly; and as these eternal battlements with which Nature had hemmed⁶ in the ravine which our travellers trod, blushed with the last tints of the fading sunlight, the valley below was gray and darkling, and the hard and devious⁷ course was sombre in twilight⁸. A few goats, hardly visible among the peaks, were cropping the scanty⁹ herbage here and there. The pipes of shepherds, calling in their flocks as they trooped homewards to their mountain villages, sent up plaintive¹⁰ echoes which moaned through those rocky and lonely steeps; the stars began to glimmer¹¹ in the purple heavens spread serenely¹² overhead and the faint crescent of the moon, which had peered for some time scarce visible in the azure¹³, gleamed out more brilliantly at every moment, until it blazed as if in triumph at the sun’s retreat. ’Tis a fair land that of France, a gentle, a green, and a beautiful; the home of arts and arms, of

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