with basaltic columns is another, yet the same term must be employed for both.
If it fell to me to describe all the most remarkable sites in Le Velay, I should have to use these expressions ad nauseam, and leave off with the consciousness that I had conveyed to the mind of the reader but a poor idea of the wonders of a wondrous land.
Happily for me, my purpose is not so extensive. I have not undertaken to write a guide-book. Baedeker has given us the skeleton of a tour in this region in five pages. Joanne has clothed the bones with flesh and blood in thirteen or fourteen, and Ardouin Dumazet has breathed into it the breath of life in three hundred and seventy. Moreover, a Syndicat d'Initiative exists at Le Puy that distributes gratis a capital guide to the sights around. But it does more than this. Throughout the summer, at a trifling cost, it organises excursions, provides vehicles to every point of interest that can be visited in a day.
A farmer does not take to market all the corn thrashed out of his stack, but a sample of his produce. He opens his hand and displays the grain to a would-be purchaser, and all I can pretend to do in this chapter is to give a few samples of what Le Velay has to show to a visitor, and I shall begin with Espaly, easily reached by electric tram. There, out of the valley of the Borne, rise two volcanic crags, washed by the river. One of these is surmounted by a toy castle, a battlemented summer-house that belongs to a gentleman of Le Puy. The other, and by far the finer, was once capped by the castle of the bishops of Le Puy. In this a bishop-designate halted the night before making his entry into the city, and here, before he was suffered to enter, the
