and wins you.  Its babbling, laughing streams fill the whole air with life and melody; every chink of the old dry walls is choked with maiden-hair; from the damp rocks amid the dripping streams hang strange, fantastic mosses,—­orange, grey and russet,—­and with them grow wild flowers, white and purple, and emerald ferns with brilliant deep-notched leaves that glisten in the wet; and mixed with all stretch out the tangled rootlets of the beeches, bathing their bright red, yellow-tipped fibres in the splashing drops.  The meadows are so intense in color, they are so supremely, so saturatedly, so bottomlessly green, that you recognize you never knew green until you saw it there; and while you gaze, you feel instinctively that you have reached a promised land.”

VII.

The most noted excursion in the Pyrenees,—­its coup de theatre,—­is now before us.  It is to Gavarnie, whose giant semicircle of precipices has been called “the end of the world.”  Luz and St. Sauveur constitute the most available headquarters for this trip, which is taken by every traveler to these mountains.  “In the popular [French] imagination,” writes a lively essayist, “the Pyrenees are composed of carriages-and-four, of capulets and berrets, of mineral waters, rocky gorges, Luchon, admirable roads, bright green valleys, two hundred and thirty hotels, and the Cirque of Gavarnie.”

The cliffs of Gavarnie form the Spanish frontier.  A village of the same name lies near their feet on this French side, thirteen miles up the defile leading south from the valley of Luz.  There is now a carriage-road for almost the entire distance, and if fame is true, never did a destination better merit a road.  We count on a memorable day, as the landau and the victoria carry us away from Luz,—­where voluntary promise of a super-excellent table-d’hote on our return has just been given by Madame Puyotte and thus every care removed.

The road crosses the valley, under the sentinel poplars, leaves on the right the road by which we came in from Pierrefitte, and shortly comes to the opening of the defile to Gavarnie.  At the immediate entrance across the ravine stands the white street of hotels and lodging-houses which constitutes the Baths of St. Sauveur.  We shall cross to it on our return, and now scan it only from the distance as we pass.  It joins itself to our highway by a superb bridge, over two hundred feet above the chasm,—­a single astonishing arch, one of the longest in existence, its span being 153 feet across, and its total length 218.  It is of marble, a gift of Louis Napoleon and Eugenie to commemorate their stay at St. Sauveur; its cost was upward of sixty thousand dollars.