The morning broke struggling through the mists that hung over the strange, weird country of the Landes. The train ran through miles of fir-trees--nothing but fir-trees, grown for the sake of their resin. Every tree had its cup slowly but steadily filling with the fragrant exudation. Every tree, as he saw, gave up its blood to help mankind; not one refused to fill with resin the cup affixed to it. Was not all Nature at work to keep the world a-going, and to better its life? And then he rebuked himself in George Herbert's lines:--
"All things are busy; only I Neither bring honey with the bees, Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry To water these.
"I am no link of Thy great chain, But all my company is as a weed. Lord! place me in Thy concert, give one strain To my poor reed."
Soon Bordeaux was reached; then, as the afternoon drew on, the Pyrenees were passed, and at midnight he alighted at Burgos, to rest a day or two before going on. An old-world place, where the railway was a gross anomaly, and the telegraph poles a violation of the fitness of things. At least two hundred years behind the times, the great offence to the eye being smart French-looking soldiers where one looked for mailed knights with their esquires. Here was a market-place with its traffic much as it had been conducted any day this five hundred years. True, by ferreting amongst the stalls you could find some nineteenth-century novelties in the shape of wax matches and paper collars; there were books, too, in secluded corners, "printed on scrofulous grey paper with blunt type," which evidenced some demand for modern literature; but, these indications of our advanced civilization excepted, the rest of the dealing was in things which cannot have much changed their form or their use for many generations. A sleepy, quiet, leisurely place, with plenty of time to be wicked in, but also with much opportunity to be good. In such a place, indeed in the whole peninsula, there is every inducement to lead the devout life; there is so little else to do. One's activities have small outlets, except towards the other world. Yet for a busy Londoner, a blasé Parisian, what a blessed sense of peace comes over the soul resting in such a becalmed water-way on one's voyage!