After I had dealt with a well-cooked little dinner, plentifully bedewed with a pleasant but not insidious wine grown upon the sunny slopes above the Dordogne, I made the discovery that the best room in the house was occupied by the dark-eyed damsel, except when a guest came along who managed to ingratiate himself with her mother, and then the daughter had to turn out. The room was not exactly luxurious, for it contained little besides the bed, a table, and a chair, but it was bright and clean; and when I had confided myself to the strong hempen sheets that had still half a century of wear in them, and had passed the first quarter of an hour, which is always critical, without being made aware by scouts and skirmishers of the advance of a hostile force, I was very thankful that I was not received with open arms in the village of St. Michel-Montaigne.
The next morning I met the Dordogne again after a long separation. It was now a great river flowing quietly through a vine-covered plain. The rapids had all been left far away, but it had begun to feel the tide, and this to a river is like the first shock of death. It struggles for awhile with destiny, and a sadder sound than the cry which it made when it came forth from the rock or the little lake is heard in the quiet evening or the more solemn night. Although it is flowing back to its true source, the river shrinks from the vast and mysterious ocean as we shrink ourselves from the immense unknown.
But at this hour of eight in the morning, with a sun so bright and a sky so blue, only the broad and serene beauty of the water makes itself felt. As the river goes curving over the vine-covered land, its stillness is almost that of a lake, and it mirrors nothing but the sky, save the trees and flowers of it's banks. The moments are precious, for the tender loveliness of the landscape will wane as the light gains strength.
On each side of the Dordogne, between the water and the vineyards, which stretch away with scarcely a break across the plain and up the sides of the distant hills, is a strip of rough field. The sunshine of four months, with hardly a shower to moisten the earth, has made flowers scarce, but on this long curving bend of coarse meadow the grass has kept something of its greenness, and the season of blossoming stays by the beautiful stream. There is a wanton tangling and mingling of the waste-loving flowers, such as the yellow toad-flax, the bristling viper's bugloss, the thorny ononis that spreads a hue of pink as it creeps along the ground, sky-blue chicory on wiry stems, large milk-white blooms of _datura_, and purple heads of _centaurea calcitrapa_, whose spines are avoided like those of a hedgehog by people who walk with bare feet. Upon the banks, the high hemp-agrimony and purple loosestrife, with here and there an evening primrose, flaunt their masses of colour over the water or the pebbly shore.