wonders of souche training, I reconsidered and accepted. He sent them. They arrived safe, a thousand of them, whereof three hundred took good root, and are now growing finely on the banks of the Ohio. Now when I shall come to relate my observations in the south of France, my reflections thereon, and plans and hopes thence resulting, I think they will be found new, interesting, and important to my fellow vine-dressers. I think they will see in souche training the true way to get wine cheaply and easily, so that none shall need to drink water, except, as Fortescue, the chancellor of Henry the Sixth, wrote of the common people of England in the days when she was "merrie," "occasionally, or by way of penance." And in the day when every farmer can, from half an acre of land, easily and cheaply planted and tilled, even by the unskillful, harvest what will fill his ten or twelve barrels with honest juice for the habitual daily drink of himself and family-our two heavy afflictions and sins, excessive water-drinking and excessive whisky-drinking, will vanish from the land, and a beneficent change in our national temperament begin to be wrought.

The vines about Créon are not generally of so low a class as the folle blanche, neither do they give great wines, such as are made in Médoc or the Sauterne

district, but are of those rather which yield the good, staple "Bordeaux," dearly loved of all Frenchmen, and for which they must pay no very moderate price either, since much of it commands, at wholesale, a dollar a gallon. It can be had in America of honorable wine-merchants dealing with others like themselves on the opposite side of the water, or, better still, who have direct relations with honorable proprietors there who reside on their estates.

The fields we next inspected were in good cultivation, but the vines were trained to stakes only, reminding me of those in the vineyards I had left behind, except that they stood nearer together and were rather smaller. They seemed to have had no very close summer pruning, but little tying up, and no leaf-pruning, though the time for it had passed. The ground had been only twice plowed, I think.

The labor is to a great extent done by contract, and of necessity it is carefully classified and specified. Where the superintendence is good, the system works admirably. It is desirable we should introduce it as soon as the vine-culture shall be well enough extended, organized, and understood, but for the present I should fear to try it. I remember that in Brown County, Ohio, they once had, and may have still, a simple plan of letting the whole labor, by con

tract, at forty or fifty dollars per acre for the year, which was at the same time costing me as much as seventy-five dollars. Wages in the neighborhood of St. Genes were forty cents a day in summer and thirty in winter. Women got but half as much.

As paper money has of late years confused our ideas of values, I will in this connection give some of the retail market prices customary about Bordeaux, so that the value of thirty and forty cents may be somewhat estimated.

Our promenade extended far beyond the domains of St. Genes, and over those of several neighboring proprietors. Entirely new to me and to my feet was this going from field to field, and farm to farm, as one may do in nearly every civilized country except Britain and America, without ever meeting fences to be climbed, walls to be scaled, bars to let down, or gates to open. The contrast between the orderly, neighborly, and trustful aspect of the scene I was studying, and the fortified look of our own cultivated

country, where at every few rods you encounter picket, or palisade, or barricade of stone, or double stake and ridered nine-rail worm fences, bristling like so many abattis, all of them "pig tight, bull strong, and stallion high," was like the contrast between peace and war.

Returning rather late to the chateau, we could give only a few moments to the wine-house. I was pleased to notice a hand-mill for crushing the grapes-a good deal nicer way than what I saw a few days later among people less advanced than my host of St. Genes. He told me, upon my inquiry, that the crop of the estate the year before-an extraordinary good one—was 500 barriques, or 30,000 gallons.

At dinner I met the ladies of the family, which, had I done before my walk, it would have been shorter, perhaps. M. P resides in Bordeaux, and the family had only come out to Saint Genes to remain through vintage. He, however, having a business-like way of looking after his interests, is frequently there.

Next day my good friends would not allow me to go back the way I came, but drove me over to a railway station some ten miles distant, the drive affording a sight of extensive vine-fields, and some most charming scenery as well.

CHAPTER III.

COGNAC.

HE speed of common railway trains in France

THE

never takes away your breath, nor whirls things out of sight before you see them. So nothing hindered my observing all we passed, on both sides of the track, leisurely enough to get an idea of the modes of training, and so forth, in the northern portions of Aquitaine-the ancient and original—the Aquitaine of Froissart's Chronicles. Many a vineyard I saw whose fresh young shoots and foliage covered and hid short, thick, rugged old stocks below, gnarled and wrinkled with a hundred years of fruit-bearing existence. But a century is a short time in the history of the vine in this antique country. The Cæsars drank the juice of its soil and were glad. The savage Visigoths, in their turn, we may be sure, got beastly drunk on it. The pious Saracens who drove out the Visigoths broke the law of the Prophet in its honor. And from the time of William