In this religious retreat I met, from time to time, some of the most radical and liberal-minded residents of the South.  Toulouse is one of the most important university centers of France, and bears with credit the proud title of “the learned city.”  With two distinguished members of the faculty, the late Dr. Nicholas Joly and Professor Moliner of the law school, I often had most interesting discussions on all the great questions of the hour.  That three heretics—­I should say, six, for my daughter, son, and his wife often joined the circle—­could thus sit in perfect security, and debate, in the most unorthodox fashion, in these holy precincts, all the reforms, social, political, and religious, which the United States and France need in order to be in harmony with the spirit of the age, was a striking proof of the progress the world has made in freedom of speech.  The time was when such acts would have cost us our lives, even if we had been caught expressing our heresies in the seclusion of our own homes.  But here, under the oaks of a Catholic convent, with the gray-robed sisters all around us, we could point out the fallacies of Romanism itself, without fear or trembling.  Glorious Nineteenth Century, what conquests are thine!

I shall say nothing of the picturesque streets of antique Toulouse; nothing of the priests, who swarm like children in an English town; nothing of the beautifully carved stone facades of the ancient mansions, once inhabited by the nobility of Languedoc, but now given up to trade and commerce; nothing of the lofty brick cathedrals, whose exteriors remind one of London and whose interiors transfer you to “the gorgeous East”; nothing of the Capitol, with its gallery rich in busts of the celebrated sons of the South; nothing of the museum, the public garden, and the broad river winding through all.  I must leave all these interesting features of Toulouse and hasten up into the Black Mountains, a few miles away, where I saw the country life of modern Languedoc.

At Jacournassy, the country seat of Mme. Berry, whose daughter my son Theodore married, I spent a month full of surprises.  How everything differed from America, and even from the plain below!  The peasants, many of them at least, can neither speak French nor understand it.  Their language is a patois, resembling both Spanish and Italian, and they cling to it with astonishing pertinacity.  Their agricultural implements are not less quaint than their speech.  The plow is a long beam with a most primitive share in the middle, a cow at one end, and a boy at the other.  The grain is cut with a sickle and threshed with a flail on the barn floor, as in Scripture times.  Manure is scattered over the fields with the hands.  There was a certain pleasure in studying these old-time ways.  I caught glimpses of the anti-revolutionary epoch, when the king ruled the state and the nobles held the lands.  Here again I saw, as never before, what vast strides the world has made within one century.