Allotting, then, two days for the journey, we are not impelled to drive off from Bigorre at any unseasonably early hour.  In fact it is verging upon noon when the start is made.  Our Tourmalet conveyances have long since gone back, and we have a fresh landau and victoria duly chartered, with two strong and capable-looking drivers.  For the first half hour or more the road retraces its steps down the valley toward the foot of the Tourmalet, only breaking off at the village of Ste. Marie.  Through this we had passed in the late afternoon rain of the drive from Bareges, and here our present road strikes away from the Bareges route and directs its way toward the Col d’Aspin.

The Vale of Campan, in which we are running, has long had its praises appreciatively sung.  It is fertile and smiling, but we decide that it does not vie with the Eden of Argeles.  The remembrance of that happy valley under the full afternoon sun, as we saw it in driving to Cauterets, diverse in its sweet fields and silenced fortresses, will long hold off all rival landscapes.  The road twines on between pastures and rye-fields, as we approach again nearer and nearer the mountains, and after an easy two-hour trot, we are drawn up before the little inn of Paillole, the last lunching-station before crossing the col.  Here is found the tidy air of nearly all these little hostelries, and our confidence in them, born at Laruns and nowhere as yet injured save by the demon kettle-rag of Grip, finds nothing here to further cripple it in any way.  There is an old man at hand to greet us, as at Grip, but his wife is by, as well, and her alert, trim manner is alien to all sooty napery.  It is always unfair to carry over a suspicious spirit from past causes of suspicion; and we prudently refrain from tampering, by reminiscence, with present good impressions.

Pending the preparation of the repast, we wander out about the grounds.  The Campan Gave is sufficiently wide to be called a river, and flows at the rear of the hotel kitchen-garden in a broad, rock-broken bed.  It is pleasant to stand by its cool, firm rush, and grow alive to the sound of it and to the pushing of the wind and to the white and blue of clouds and sky framing the sunshine.  Cities and city life fall so suddenly out of sight, as an unreal thing, in the presence of these rustlings of Nature’s garments.

From this winning little olitory plot here at the side of the house by the river, we can see under an arbored porch the kitchen itself, open to the world.  The old woman is at work within, as we can also see, at the needful culinary incantations; and assisting her with single-minded but safely-controlled zeal is her husband the landlord, aproned for the occasion.