and the provinces about them lived in constant worriment.  This valley especially suffered from their armed bands; now they raided some exposed hamlet, now made prisoners of merchants or travelers on the highway, anon swooped down here upon Bagneres and made off with money and live stock in gratifying plenty.

And centuries yet preceding this, the valley saw wars on a larger scale, when Caesar and his Romans, ploughing victoriously through Gaul, came to the Aquitani and crushed them down into the furrows with the rest, after repeated and furious resistance.  The Romans knew too of these springs, and there are still remains of the city,—­Vicus Aquensis,—­which they built on this site.  In the Museum are Roman relics found while excavating, among them votive tablets recording the donors’ gratitude to the nymphs of the springs for cures effected.  Clearly, Bigorre is of no mushroom growth, but has been toughened and seasoned by age and warfare into the just reward of its nowaday repose and popularity.

II.

It is Sunday, and there is service in the English chapel, a brief walk away.  It is conducted by the nervous, genial chaplain staying at the hotel, who afterwards greets us cordially at the noon luncheon-hour, and justifies our pleasure at finding a tongue which can return English for English and with fluency.  He officiates at Pau during the winter, he tells us, and here at Bigorre during the summer; and so, in a sense, we find, does the hotel proprietor himself, who, with his expansive wife, owns a hotel in Pau as well as here, and conducts the former during the winter months, when the season at Bigorre is ended.

The day is evidently that of some special saint; the population is out in its brightest hues.  Saints are in great authority with these people; their recurrent “days” fill the calendar; their ascribed specialties are as various as were those of the minor Greek or Egyptian deities.  All is in reverence, be it added; canonization is a very sacred thing with the Catholic peasant.  The power even of working ill seems to be, in curious ignorance, at times attributed to certain of these saints; “I have seen with my own eyes,” relates a native Gascon writer, M. de Lagreze, “a woman who, wishing to disembarrass herself of her husband, demanded of a venerable priest, as the most natural thing in the world, that he should say a mass for her to St. Secaire; she was convinced that, this saint, unknown to martyrology, had the power of withering up (secher) and killing troublesome individuals, to accommodate those who invoked his aid."[27]

[27] “This woman,” naively adds the writer, “irritated at the refusal of the priest, showed that she could dispense with saintly help in the matter altogether:  she killed her husband herself, with a gun.”