IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE 159

looked forward all across France, to open a little hidden door from this passage, at the back of the alcove exactly above my pillow, and surprise, or wake, me in the morning.

I think I only remember once starting in rain. Usually the morning sun shone through the misty spray and farthrown diamonds of the fountain in the south-eastern suburb, and threw long poplar shadows across the road to Genlis.

Genlis, Auxonne, Dôle, Mont-sous-Vaudrey-three stages of 12 or 14 kilometres each, two of 18; in all about 70 kilometres = 42 miles, from Dijon gate to Jura foot-we went straight for the hills always, lunching on French plums and bread.

Level plain of little interest to Auxonne. I used to wonder how any mortal creature could be content to live within actual sight of Jura, and never go to see them, all their lives! At Auxonne, cross the Saone, wide and beautiful in clear shallows of green stream-little more, yet, than a noble mountain torrent; one saw in an instant it came from Jura. Another hour of patience, and from the broken yellow limestone slopes of Dôle-there, at last, they were-the long blue surges of them fading as far as eye could see to the south, more abruptly near to the north-east, where the bold outlier, almost island, of them, rises like a precipitous Wrekin, above Salins. Beyond Dôle, a new wildness comes into the more undulating country, notable chiefly for its clay-built cottages with enormously high thatched gables of roof. Strange, that I never inquired into the special reason of that form, nor looked into a single cottage to see the mode of its inhabitation!

184. The village, or rural town, of Poligny, clustered out of well-built old stone houses with gardens and orchards, and gathering at the midst of it into some pretence or manner of a street, straggles along the roots of Jura at the opening of a little valley, which, in Yorkshire or Derbyshire

[Version 0.04: March 2008]