An imposing marble stairway leads upward to reading, billiard and gaming apartments, cafe and restaurant and a theatre-hall.  Evidently the Thermal Establishment is the pivot of Cauterets.  The serious use of these waters is carried to a science.  You can be steamed, suffused, sprayed, sponged, showered, submerged or soaked.  You can seek health from a teaspoon or a tub.  Make choice, and buy a season ticket.  Rather, the attendant physicians make the choice, for all is by rule here and no one moistens lip or finger without due prescription.

[Illustration:  “THE TOWN IS WAITING FOR THE DILIGENCE.”]

These springs are celebrated among French doctors.  The systems of treatment are kept abreast of all modern theories.  The waters are sulphureous, very hot, and abundant.  They serve in throat and stomach troubles and for a wide range of ailments “where there is indicated a powerfully alterative and stimulating treatment.”

We ramble back across the esplanade and out into the streets.  The stores, always friendly in their hostile designs, conspire to be especially attractive in Cauterets.  We waste much time—­from a masculine standpoint—­in an enticing lace store, where really fine Spanish nettings are purchased at tempting prices.  They sell too, in Cauterets, the woolly stuffs called Bareges crape, marvelously delicate in texture, woven in various tints for mufflers and capes and shoulder-wraps.  Farther up the street, we are allured during the forenoon into buying a woollen berret or two, and scarlet sashes, the badge of the country, for to-morrow’s mountain excursion; and yield in the plaza to the fascination of barley-sugar candy and toothsome cakes of Spanish chocolate.  But all entreaties to buy young Pyrenean dogs warranted bred in the region, are manfully resisted.

We invest too in a strange variety of umbrella, which can be folded into wondrously small compass and put into the pocket or the traveling-bag,—­invest in it after a long struggle of rates, wherein each side gains the satisfaction of victory by a compromise.  The eagerness of the Frenchy vendor,—­his dramatic acting-out of the umbrella’s workings,—­his voluble deprecation of a possible lower price, and his gradual sliding down from his end of the scale as we rise in it from ours,—­these accessories fully double the zest of the transaction for both.  One must be wary and alert to properly enjoy European shopping; but if one is thus prepared, it can be made to furnish very solid enjoyment indeed.  “As a rule,” as the genial author of Sketches in the South of France observes, “the British purchaser must offer one half the price asked.  Everybody does it, and it is in no way offensive, because the sum has been pre-arranged accordingly.  The British costume springs the market at least ten per cent, bad French ten more, and an apparent ignorance of both market and language cannot be let off at less than thirty or forty.  Expostulation is useless,