"I don't much like that place where we slept last night; but they do live up to the name of the village." "How do you make that out?"
"Isn't Captious the name? Well, at night the old woman while she was cooking some nasty stuff ordered me to fetch one of the carriage wheels to put in the pan. Absurd! she was making game of me. It would not go into what she called her casserolle."
I laughed and said: "Oh, Pengelly! she asked for huile, that is to say oil."
He shook his head and said, "Captious is the name of the place, and captious are the people."
From Bordeaux for some days the journey is through the Department of the Landes, and is not a little wearisome, consisting as it does of miles upon miles of pinewoods interspersed with heaths; and with only here and there a few patches of barley and a little maize about a wretched village or rather hamlet. The surface of the ground is of a dull grey or ash-coloured sand. Only here and there does a little rock rise above the arenaceous bed and that is a fossiliferous sandstone. A few sheep, lean and out of condition, may be seen, guarded by the shepherd on stilts. By the aid of these, locally called échosses, he can stride through the prickly gorse and thorn bushes, and get over the ground much faster than when on foot. The shepherd carries in his hand a long pole with a bit of board affixed part way down to serve as a seat, and thus, as on three legs he can balance himself wrhilst watching his flock as they stray after the sparse herbage, and at the same time he knits stockings all day long. The peasants of the Landes are all, women as well as men, familiar with the use of stilts, and a singular appearance do they present when, against the horizon one sees a procession of stork-like figures striding over the country at a prodigious rate. Near the coast the sand is blown over pools and forms a crust that conceals the water. But for his stilts many a peasant would incautiously step on these treacherous surfaces, and be engulfed.
The sand is driven inland by the gales from the west, blowing it in veritable waves irresistibly forward. For many centuries these moving mountains of sand rolled inland at an alarming rate between the mouth of the Gironde and that of the Adour, covering a vast territory, destroying rich pasturage and arable
