explored, as well as a similar cavern close by.  The excitement was increased by the circumstance that the discovery of these openings appeared to coincide with the indications of a local witch.  It was evident that the caverns had at one time been used by men, for they contained masonry put together with mortar.  By dint of excavating, hidden galleries were revealed; but although a human skeleton was discovered, no treasure was found.  The explorers, however, came upon a vast collection of bones of extinct animals, and of others which, although they are now to be found both in the Arctic and in the tropical regions, have not existed in a state of nature in France during the historic period.  The bones of the reindeer, for instance, were found lying with those of the hyena and the rhinoceros, many of them embedded in the calcareous breccia so frequently seen in the valley of the Cele.  Here was evidence of a glacial and a torrid period, separated by an aeonic gulf; but how the remains came to be piled one upon another in this way is a secret of the ancient earth.  There are prodigious layers of these bones lying at a great depth in the rock, where there is no cavern to suggest that the animals entered by it, or that they were taken there by man.  The beds of phosphate which English enterprise has turned to so good an account in this part of France, and which are followed in the earth just like a seam of coal or a vein of metal, are merely layers of bones.  While I was at Brengues, the skeleton of a young rhinoceros was discovered in the phosphate mine at Cajarc.

On the hill above the Cele, on the side opposite to that where the Chateau des Anglais is to be seen, are the remains of an entrenched camp, upon the origin of which it is almost idle to speculate.  In the same neighbourhood is a cavern situated high up in the face of a perpendicular rock.  It is inaccessible by ordinary means; but a beam fixed at the entrance, and worn into a deep groove by a rope, shows that it was used as a refuge.  A tradition says that Waifre hid himself there.

I passed the night at Brengues, and was awakened in the early morning by the jingle of bells just beneath my window, and a man’s voice repeating, ‘Te, Te, Te!’ A couple of bullocks were being yoked, and presently they followed the man towards the fields of tobacco and maize by the little river, already shining in the sun.  Very soon afterwards I, too, had begun my day’s work.

In a little more than an hour I was at the next village—­St. Sulpice.  Here above the houses, huddled together like sheep on the lower steep of the right-hand hill, were the ruins of a castle, hanging to the rock that dwarfed it even in the days of its pride.  I climbed to it, and found that it was built on terraces one above the other, formed by the rocky shelves.  A considerable portion of the strong wall at the base of the structure remains, and on each terrace there is something left of the feudal fortress.  Ivy,