CORRESPONDENCE.

A PYRENEAN HOLIDAY.—V. TO LUCHON. (coNctusiox.) (To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1 Sfit,—The change from Saint Sauveur to Bagneres de Bigorre is a plunge from perfect peace into the gay world, even at the end of September when the season is quite over. We went by way of Tarbes, partly because "Lady Kidddrminster," in Miss Thackeray's tale, had been "beaucoup frappde " with the gaiety of the market-day there, and partly because "Geoffry Smith" made his final and successful offer to Esther in some room at the Tarbes station, which I desired to identify, though in vain; for, to tell the truth, Miss Thackeray has confounded the waiting-room there with the abode of the luggage,—places kept in all French stations most scrupulously apart; and I am quite sure that Esther never could have been sitting "on a packing-case " in that sacred seclusion in which passengers are kept at Tarbes between the purchasing of their tickets and the time when the train is announced. We quite agreed, however, with Geoffry that 'Tarbes was " a horrible hole," and with Mr. Penton, when he said, "I am surprised that Lady Kidderminster should have had such a high opinion of this—a—position." And even Bigorre a little disappointed us. Miss Thackeray has made the most of the Adour and its islands, and perhaps we did not make the most of it. Geoffry Smith went up to the top of the Bedat before breakfast, and found not only " opal morning lights, with refractions of loveliest colour painting the hills and brooks, the water-plants, the fields where the women were working already,. and the slippery mountain-sides, where the pine-trees grew and the flocks and goats, with their tinkling bells, were grazing," but found his Undine, too, sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream with reeds and water-leaves in her hair. Now, early rising is not my forte, and we did not see Bagneres de Bigorre as that "fair early riser" saw it. To us, it seemed hardly more beautiful than a more fashionable Malvern transplanted to the side of a river in the South. The great mountains are quite distant. The avenues in the neigh- bourhood are a little formal and desolate, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular, but just dabbed down on a bare hill-side, like a ready-made doll's avenue on a green-baize cloth, without, apparently, any final cause. Our little table- d'hilte room was festooned with artificial flowers. The bazaar was extensive and tawdry; and we were rather haunted by old ladies who were always eating, and who talked in a deep bass voice (I suspected one of them of being " Lady Kidderminster " herself); and altogether there was an air of inferior fashion about Bigorre which recalled Lord Alfred Vargrave and Lord Lytton's 4‘ Lucile." But perhaps I am prejudiced. We had one lovely drive ; and one walk in which an angel of an old woman who resided at Gerde, seeing I was tired, insisted on mounting me on a donkey with a sack for a saddle and a forelock for the only bridle, by which bridle she herself led the creature ; and who afterwards fed me plentifully with peaches. If ever there was a good woman, it was that benevolent old Samaritan of Gerde. But take it as a whole, Bagneres de Bigorre reminded me more of that foppish and dreary 4. Lucile," than of Miss Thackeray's lovely picture. No doubt, the fault was mine.

However, we were glad at heart when we found ourselves in the carriage, climbing the mountains on our way to Luchon. We took the road which, as Miss Thackeray says, " goes bursting over the great Col d'Aspin, from whence you may see the world, like a sea, tossing and heaving at your feet, and trembling with the lights upon a thousand hills." And a wonderful way it is. When you leave Paillole, you pass just by the source of the Adour,—the cradle of the river which we had seen breasting the terrible Atlantic breakers below Bayonne ; and then the pass winds into a thick and fragrant pine-wood, beside what looked like a federal republic of ante,—a group of gigantic ants' nests almost big enough for the abodes of the legendary gold-ants of which I read in Mr. Church's " Herodotns." I wish Sir John Lubbock would investigate .the formican polity which evidently exists in that wood on the Col d'Aspin. I suspect he would find arrangements like those of the United States, and perhaps some distinguished ant possessed of all the powers of peace and war as President of the Republic. As you emerge from the pine-wood, you see, looking back, first the Pic d'Arbizon, and then the grand and almost turretted top of the Pic du. Midi de Bigorre, in the near distance, seemingly gazing after you with a grim and threatening air that makes you almost nervous at turning your back upon them. It was a

lovely late September noon,—and yet I had some of the feeling that Wordsworth describes as haunting him in his starlight row on Esthwaite Water, when,—

" Behind the craggy steep till then The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Uprearod its head. I struck, and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me."

But this haunting feeling produced by the presence of one or two grand summits suddenly appearing, and seeming to follow you about, was soon removed by the magic springing open of

the landscape, as if some secret spring had been touched, into one of the most marvellously lovely scenes I ever beheld. A single step, and there before us lay ridge upon ridge of distant mountain-chains, all bathed in that deep rich blue which one associates more with southern oceans than southern skies, some crowned, some covered, with glacier, some concentrating their essence, as it were, in one or two bare and jagged peaks, some rippling away in undulating lines like a reef beneath a tropical sea. At our feet lay the basin in which Aspin and Armin lie, so deep beneath that you seemed to be able to throw a stone to the very bottom, down the side of which the mountain-road, in some of the longest and sharpest zigzags I ever saw, carefully threaded its way.

A very pretty girl, who was shepherding some sheep on the mountain-side, with two little brothers and a favourite dog, came to entertain us while we lingered, and present us with mountain bouquets, chattering all the time in very excellent and intelligible French of the different mountains before ns.

There was the Val d'Aure and Val do Luron, beneath us ; and_ far beyond, the Pic de la Pez, and the Pic do Claribede, and the Crabioules—those glaciered heights which tower above the

many cataracts of the Val du Lys—and the great Maladetta itself with its mighty snows, and all the mountains of Venasque,

and a hundred more, stretching away in great ridges of tur-

quoise, east and west. How reluctant we were to leave. Our voiturier got impatient at last, and began to drive slowly off, and one of our little attendants, pointing at him, said, " Il vent s'en alley." So we were soon trotting down the steep inclines,—a descent, during which one of the horses, being young and restless, and the other not very sure-footed, I was plunged in deep anxiety,—towards the beautiful town of Arreau. The next day's journey, over the Col do Peyre- sourde, was beautiful enough, though not like that over the Col

d'Aspin. It took us beside one or two very old towers, built, it was said, in the old days by the English Dukes of Dour- deaux to resist the Spanish incursions,—beside sunny banks where hosts of lizards were darting in and out, and great, thistle-flowers, as large, and bright, and hard as sunflowers cast in burnished metal, gemmed the bank,—beside chestnuts and olives and beeches, and the mouths of lovely, rich valleys, where village and village church seemed set on high to encourage the lower valleys in the long and laborious mountain ascent, till we reached the opening to the Lac d'Oo.

Lord Lytton says that in gazing on the Lac d'Oo the whole "secret of the Universe" flashed on his soul,—which, no doubt, explains a good deal that has since happened. We can hardly say the same, and as, like other persons on whom the whole secret of the universe has flashed,—Lord Lytton declined to tell it, and we had no talent for rediscovering it, we regarded the little lake, I think, rather as the place where Lucile and Lord Alfred Vargrave got wet, and did not engage themselves, and the Due de Louvois lamed himself and his horse, than as a great key to cosmical secrets. It was here that Lord Lytton

"—Caught the great choral chaunt, mark'd the dread pageant move, The divine Whence and Whither of life ! But, oh ! daughter Of Oo, not more safe in the deep, silent water, Is thy secret than mine in my heart. Even so,

What I then saw and heard, the world never shall know."

That " even so " is a fine touch. Certainly, we never knew it, and had some doubts whether it was worth knowing. The Lac d'Oo itself is as like the Lac de Gaube as one mountain tarn fed by glaciers is to another; but to us, at least, was more engaging. The day was lovely. The handsome impostor who called himself our guide, because he rode up (on a lame horse) in our company, with a beautiful red sash round his waist, and charged handsomely for both himself and the lame horse, as well as, I have no doubt, for the sash, was, at least, picturesque. There is always something very grand about these deep moun- tain solitudes, and the rough, steep zigzags which lead to them, and the Lac d'Oo, which is fed by one great waterfall, and drained by another wider, fuller, but of much less height, is certainly amongst the most beau- tiful of Pyrenean tarns. But after all, the descent, in the lengthening shadows of the mountains, with the declining sun shining full on the eastern range which we there faced, was even more beautiful than the Lac d'Oo. And when we regained our carriage and drove into Luchon, we agreed in thinking that no lake, whether in the Pyrenees or the Alps, has in it the one- hundredth part of the beauty of a great mountain view.

For ordinary travellers like us, Luchon is certainly the love- liest spot in the Pyrenees. It was desolate when we were there, being a place intended for organised gaiety, and laid out for a fashionable crowd which had departed. The company which assembled at our little table d'ho'te was like the muster of a few ghosts of the past. But in spite of all this, in those early days of October, Luchon was exquisitely lovely. The mornings were cold and crisp, the noons not more than warm and golden, and the evenings fresh ; and the drives or rides were full of grandeur at every turn. The Val de Lys, with its deep-set cascades,—one of them, called the "Hell-hole," burrowing into the rocks till you could hardly catch the gleam of its waters,—was a strange resort of decaying glaciers, glaciers not exactly going down in the world, for as they shrink, of course they rather ascend, but in the sear and yellow leaf, shrinking into them- selves, and yet leaving clear traces of what in their vigorous youth they had• been. But the grandest of our expeditions was that to the Pic d'Entecade, to which you turn off from the Hospice de Luchon. That was a day I can never forget. The drive itself was grand enough, up a road almost as steep as a mountain torrent. Then, on horseback, we entered a pine wood, and, after many steep zigzags, came out on the bare mountain-side, to meet a team of Spanish muleteers and their gaily-trapped mules, descending with their wine-skins into France. Then going on and up through steep meadows, past a tiny tarn which glittered like a brilliant turquoise in the sun, we left our horses just to mount the last rocky brow, and found ourselves on one of a thousand peaks, towering up in a host all round us, as far as the eye could reach, so that the Pyrenees seemed not a chain, but rather a circular forest, of mountains, of which ours was the centre. The Garonne sprang just beneath us ; to the south-west the huge Maledetta, with its world of snows, rose conspicuous above the whole chain. But turn where we would, there were innumerable peaks in the direct line from the eye to any single point of the horizon. If we saw one peak, we certainly saw five hundred, probably more, for I made an effort to com- pute, and failed utterly when I had got to three hundred. A Spanish shepherd-boy, whom we found at the top, was, except- ing our guide and his son, our only company. There were thirty villages, French and Spanish, within sight,--we ourselves were in Spain,—and around us fluttered a few bright butterflies, and just one or two swallows. It was our farewell to the Pyrenees. The next day we were driving rapidly down by the banks of the Garonne, whose source we had just seen ; and on the third day, when watching from Montrejeau the lovely dawn flush the glaciers of the Maledetta, and bathe the distant mountains in a sea of gold, we said that the time of memory had begun, and that except in that softened reflection of the past which un- happily grows less vivid with every month and year, for us at least it was but too true that" it n'y a pas de Pyrenees."—Yours,