Here we were surrounded by trees just as Robinson Crusoe was by his grove when it had grown tall and thick. Now, the traveller in Southern France who lingers as I am wont to linger in my wanderings, will probably have cause to pine, as I have pined, for trees about his house to shelter him from the fury of the summer sun. There are few houses that are not hovels or ruins to be found, except where the land is fertile, and wherever it repays labour the owner loathes a tree that produces nothing but its wood. Thus we get those wide, burning plains, where so few trees are to be seen save poplars along the watercourses and walnuts bordering the roads. Even these become rare, as in journeying farther south the last low buttresses of the rocky highlands are left behind.
Here, close to this retreat that I had chosen on the banks of the Isle, some twenty miles below Périgueux, rose, on the opposite side of the river, high cliffs of white limestone with wooded brows. The château was on a small island formed by a curve of the river under the cliffs, and a short canal drawn across the loop to facilitate the navigation of the Isle.
A very lazy kind of navigation it was. Two or three barges would pass in a day on their way to Périgueux or Bordeaux. They were of considerable size, and were capable of some sea-faring, but their masts were now laid flat, and they were towed along at the rate of two or three yards a minute by a lean and melancholy horse that had ceased to care for cursing, and was almost indifferent to beating. As the navigation had been nearly killed by the railway, the canal was allowed to fill itself with water-plants, which were interesting to me, but exceedingly hurtful to the temper of the bargees. They vented their fury upon the engineer, who was absent, and the horse that was present--unfortunately for the poor brute, for somehow he seemed to be looked upon as a representative of the negligent functionary.
'You appear to be having a bad time,' said I one day to a great dark bargee who was streaming from every pore, as much from bad temper as from the exertion of cracking his whip, and whose haggard horse looked as if he would soon break off in the middle from the strain of trying to move the barge, which was stuck in the weeds.