stones was to destroy the gateway and roll down the hewn blocks. Midway between these gates is the Château des Anglais suspended like a swallow's nest under the eaves of an overhanging cliff, which serves as roof to it. It is tolerably perfect, for the very good reason that no one can get at it to pull it to pieces. Ladders must be constructed against the rock, cramped to it, to enable any one to mount to the door. It cannot be reached from above, as the rock overhangs too much for that. On the same river, a little lower, is a much more extensive castle in the air, consisting of a series of caverns helped out with walls. This is believed to have been one of the last refuges of Duke Waifre of Aquitaine in the middle of the eighth century. Pepin hunted him from place to place. Dislodged from his rocky castle at Brengues, Waifre escaped into Périgord, and hid among the chalk lurking holes, where it was impossible for him to be caught. Pepin knew this, and he offered bribes to his servants. Corrupted by these, some of them assassinated him when he was asleep on the night of June 2, 768. Pepin despoiled the body of the gold bracelets adorned with pendant gems which the unfortunate duke had been accustomed to wear, and gave them to the Abbey of St. Denis, where they remained for centuries, and were called "the pears of Waifre." The body of the duke was transferred to Limoges, and his tomb is under the present cathedral, and is marked by a curious piece of carving and an inscription let into the wall of the crypt that contains it. There can exist no doubt whatever that many of these rock habitations were converted into strongholds by the Free Companies that terrorized the country during the English domination ; but it is singular how few of them are mentioned by the historians of the period by name as such. There is one, still called the Castle of the English, which occupies an impregnable position in the face of the cliff in the great cirque of Autoire, which was held by the freebooter Perducat d'Albret, who, however, served the English and the French alike, or rather he served himself first, and sold his sword alternately to the English and to the French. Nevertheless, the castles held by these French freebooters are all attributed to the English, as, indeed, is every mysterious and daring work of which the ruins remain through the country. Autoire is a superb limestone cirque facing north, and opening into the broad plain of the Dordogne. The cliffs rise four hundred feet from the river bottom, and the river shoots over them into the lap of the great basin in a fall of which the Alps need not be ashamed. From the precipices all round issue streams that have travelled underground, and in frosty weather they steam as if they were boiling. As they rain down the white cliffs they nourish mighty beds of luxuriant maidenhair fern. More than half-way up the side of this vast cauldron is the castle. It is built on a ledge only twelve feet wide, three of which are taken up by the castle wall. There is space only for a circular tower, and then for a cordon of chambers seventy feet long. Outside the round tower are the oven and remains of domestic buildings. In the event of the garrison of this structural castle being hard pressed, two means of escape were reserved. By climbing like a cat up the face of the precipice with hands and toes, a narrow ledge hardly three feet wide is reached, which gives access to chambers scooped in the rock. The other means of escape was by running along the ledge on which the castle is built, up the side of the cauldron to a point where formerly a tall tree grew out of the rock. Tradition says that the garrison were able to escape that way to the plateau above. They ran like squirrels up the tree, and leaped from a bough into an ivy bush that clung to the rock, and from which they were able to ascend to the barren plain above. It was from this castle at Autoire that Villandrando made a sudden swoop upon Figeac in 1372, and plundered it | walls, windows, doorways, passages. of treasure to the amount of fifty thou- Apparently at one time a town existed sand gold francs, and would not give there, which has disappeared, and not up the town to the French king before a soul remains there now. he was promised and paid one hundred and twenty thousand more francs. Perducat d'Albret was in England on the occasion of Wat Tyler's rebellion, and he armed and stood by the king. Richard, for his readiness, gave him the Castle of Caumont, where he died in 1382. Froissart has a good deal to say about him. One very singular "castle in the air" is that of La Roque Gageac on the Dordogne. It is built on a shelf in the face of an overhanging precipice, and was quite inaccessible till about three years ago, when it was reached by driving pegs into the face of the cliff, thus forming a precarious stair. The peg-holes remained, but the original series of wooden steps had long ago disappeared. This castle is in very tolerable preservation, partly because it could not be reached, and partly because, when accessible, if thrown down, its stones would have crashed into the roofs of the little town that clings to the roots of the precipice. The history of this stronghold is pretty well known. It belonged to the Bishop of Sarlat, and it never fell into the power of the English, who, how ever, held the rocky bastide, or free town, on a height on the opposite side of the river. As it happens, we do know something of this place. We know that about 990 Froterius, Bishop of Périgueux, built a castle there to defend the valley from the incursions of the Normans. We know also that the place existed through the Middle Ages till the year 1401, when the Englishminded captain, the Seigneur of Limeul, took it by surprise on Passion Sunday from the Seigneur Adelmar, who was of the French allegiance, and hanged every man found therein. Since that date it is never mentioned. Now it so happened, when the writer visited the spot recently, that some masons had been turning over the soil under the overleaning cliffs in quest of sand, and they had pitched on the kitchen midden of the inhabitants. They had disclosed vast masses of bones and pottery, but all the pottery was of the beautiful black paste that is distinctive of the early iron age. Consequently this rock dwelling must have been occupied by the early Gauls, ages before the Bishop of Périgueux built his fortress. There can be no question, had the men gone a few feet deeper, they would have unearthed the remains of the bronze and polished stone age, and some feet below that again the flint and bone weapons of the first inhabitants of the soil, when glaciers covered the centre of France, and rolled down the Vézère as far as Brive. Of the "castles in the air" the peasants have a tradition. They relate that they were held by the English - les brigands, mais c'étaient des Anglais, c'est la même chose and that they The peas On the Vézère, opposite Le Moustier, is a huge sheer cliff, two thousand feet long. A seam runs along it half-way up from end to end, and at the base it overhangs some thirty to forty feet. The whole of this upper seam, which forms a terrace overhung by the natural rock, has been inhabited, and presents a series of chambers. Not only so, but below as well, all the over- were reduced in this wise. hanging lower rock has been utilized for buildings. At some remote period huge masses of rock that leaned forward have fallen, and form a pile of rock ruin beyond the line to which the overhanging rock reaches at present. Now had these brigands, the EnAll this agglomeration of rock is cut glish, been content with dwelling in about into staircases, basements for the holes of the rocks, this would not ants collected brushwood, molten pitch and fat in casks on the summit of the rocks, and lighted the whole mass, which they rolled over upon the troglodyte habitations below. of our poets have not somewhere in their works referred to the metropolis. Often they are more appalled by its vast extent than fascinated by its attractions. have injured them, but they had con- streets has been told in verse, and few structed galleries of wood to form means of communication from one set of chambers to another. They had also built out projecting apartments, and the molten, flaming matter poured over and ignited these structures, which blazing, licked the cliff, and sent fiery tongues and volumes of smoke into the cave dwellings. Wherever chalk is touched by fire it goes to pieces, and the faces of the chambers crumbled away. The occupants were smothered or burnt. That this actually was the manner in which some of these strongholds were reduced cannot be doubted. The marks of fire are present still. Where the chalk has been burnt and it crumbles it assumes the look of brown sugar, and wherever this brown-sugary appearance is present about the rock windows and doors of one of these castles in the air, we know the manner of its reduction. In conclusion, the writer ventures on a guess in etymology. Rock dwellings in the old English Guyenne - it was English for three hundred years - are called Rouffes, and those who inhabited them Rouffiens. Is it not possible that our English word "ruffian " may be a reminiscence of these freebooters who had their strongholds in the rock, when Guyenne was a province attached to the English crown? From All The Year Round. ALTHOUGH London has never appealed to the imagination of its inhabitants in general, nor its men of letters in particular, in quite the same way as Paris, and though with considerable truth a modern poet has apostrophized it as The fair aspect of the town in the seventeenth century is borne witness to by Milton in language which to-day might seem somewhat exaggerated. Knowing well the busy hum of men Aldersgate Street and St. Bride's, Whitehall and rural Holborn - he must have loved it not a little when he exclaims: Oh City founded by Dardanian hands, Too blest abode ! no loveliness we see Cowper, again, at a later period- As London- opulent, enlarged, and still thinking, perchance, of his careless To Shelley's sensitive soul it was not the streets of brick or stone, but the men and women who trod them, often in sorrow, that won his regard. Flitting as he did from one temporary residence to another, few parts of the West End could have been unknown to him from the day when in company with Hogg he arrived at the lodgings in Poland Street, attracted by a which reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw, and of freedom." Later, too, in his lodgings in Half-Moon Street, where the poet loved to sit in a projecting window, book in hand, what yet from early days the story of its strange contrasts must he not have City that waitest to be sung, For whom no hand To mighty strains the lyre hath strung Though mightier theme the mightiest ones name perceived in the busy stream of life in come down to us, the statement must Piccadilly! Thus he writes of London I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Other poets, however, have touched their lyres with a lighter hand. These sing of the world of fashion and of pleasure under various guises, with here and there a note of regret for the past: The quaint old dress, the grand old style, The mots, the racy stories, The wine, the dice, the wit, the bile, The hate of Whigs and Tories. The motley show of Vanity Fair appeals to them, the lights and shadows of that world "where the young go to learn, and the old to forget." These writers of vers de société, dealing with London life, recognize that often The mirth may be feigning, the sheen may be glare, be taken with a rather large grain of salt. His dinners in Park Street and at Melton were considered to be the best in England, and, according to Gronow, he never invited more than eight people, and insisted upon having the somewhat expensive luxury of an apricot tart on the sideboard the whole year round. The Lady Dorothea Sidney, to whom, under the sweet-sounding sobriquet of Saccharissa, Edmund Waller addressed so much of his lovepoetry, was not, according to Johnson, "to be subdued by the power of verse, but rejected his addresses, it is said, with disdain." In 1639 she married the Earl of Sunderland, "and in her old age meeting somewhere with Waller, asked him when he would again 'When write such verses upon her. you are as young, madam,' said he, ' and as handsome as you were then.'" Sheridan wrote of The Campus Martius of St. James's Street, Where the beau's cavalry pass to and fro Before they take the field in Rotten Row, and a modern poet recalls the memory of The plats at White's, the play at Crock's, And Selwyn's ghastly funning. An exile from London would rejoice to greet once again "the long-lost but with admirable philosophy are pleasures of St. James's Street," and a brought to confess that similar spirit breathes in the wellknown verses of Charles Morris on Pall Mall: The gingerbread's gilt in Vanity Fair. What memories are aroused by the mention of St. James's Street and Pall Mall! To the poet St. James's Street is one of classic fame, peopled with the For in truth I can't relish the country, ghosts of bygone celebrities : — Where Saccharissa sigh'd When Waller read his ditty, Where Byron lived and Gibbon died, And Alvanley was witty This same Lord Alvanley, of Park Street, St. James's, is spoken of in Captain Gronow's reminiscences as being perhaps the greatest wit of modern times, though from the anecdotes of his skill in this direction which have In town let me live, then, in town let me die, not I. find no man at all intellectual who is With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Further citywards the crowded markets of Eastcheap in the reign of Henry the Fourth are recorded by John Lydgate in his "London Lackpenny : Then I hyed me into Est-Chepe, One cryes rybbs of befe and many a pye; Pewter pottes they clattered on a heape, But for lack of money I myght not spede. Stow tells us that this part of the town was frequented by butchers, and also cooks, "and such other as sold victuals ready dressed of all sorts. For of old time when friends did meet and were disposed to be merry, they went not to dine and sup in taverns, but to the cooks, where they called for meat what they liked, which they always found well-dressed at a reasonable rate.' "" John Gilpin was a linen-draper in Cheapside, according to Cowper: The insecure state of the streets is Smack went the whip, round went the also borne witness to as follows: Prepare for death if here at night you roam, And sign your will before you sup from home. But to return to Pall Mall, we find Gay praising it in his "Trivia," or "Art of Walking the Streets of London," a work which contains much that is of interest as regards the city in the days of Queen Anne. "Oh, bear me," he cries, "to the paths of fair Pall Mall, Safe are thy pavements, grateful is thy smell. At distance rolls the gilded coach, No sturdy carmen on thy walks encroach." While St. James's Street and Pall Mall thus share the poetic tribute of praise, other parts of London are by no means forgotten. The bustle of Cheapside, the quiet of the Inns of Court, the full tide of life in the Strand, the majesty of the river-all these are to be found recorded in verse. Chaucer has sung of the gay prentice who would sing and hop at every bridal, and who loved the tavern better than the shop, and When ther eny riding was in Chepe, wheel, Were ever folks so glad? Wood Street has been immortalized by Wordsworth, for the thrush at the corner with its glad note brought back the memory of country sights and sounds to "Poor Susan : " Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Then the Mermaid Tavern, near Bread Souls of Poets dead and gone, The Temple calls up a host of equally interesting associations, and has inspired many a bard from the time of Spenser, who wrote of |