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America is anything but considerate when she sends us her entomological pests. We owe the Phylloxera to America; the Phylloxera, that calamitous insect against which our vine-growers wage incessant war: and to-day she is sending us the haricot-weevil, which threatens to be a plague of the future. A few experiments gave me some idea of the peril of such an invasion.
The remedy abroad is also ours to plant varieties which are phylloxera-proof, or nearly so. Fortunately we have many which defy this pestiferous little root-louse, and European vine-growers have been importing them by the million. They are still used chiefly as stocks on which to graft varieties of the vinifera species.
The ravages of the phylloxera in the neighbouring vineyards caused a wholesale exodus of vine-growers belonging to the Reformed Church, and in 1886 the number had dwindled to such an extent that the services of a pastor were no longer required. The minister in charge was transferred elsewhere. The dull little town of Agde is another ancient site. Its name is alike a poem and a history.
Alas, "to do as our fathers did," with no innovations, is the law of the land. Accordingly, the vine-growers continue to leave the refuse of the grape in the juice during its fermentation, which makes the wine detestable, when it might be a source of ever-springing wealth, and an industry for the community.
But in the family interior, far from the noise of affairs, the bustle of towns, in hamlets, among the vine-growers and tenders of the silk-worm, in the mountains and retired valleys, the home-tongue is again at ease.
After the insurrection of 1830, France was too agitated to pay much attention to the rising of the vine-growers of Issoudun; a terrible affair, the facts of which have never been made public, for good reasons. In the first place, the bourgeois of Issoudun refused to allow the military to enter the town.
On September 21st the Thetis and the Espérance at last set sail; passing off Pitcairn Island, Easter Island, and Juan Fernandez, now a convict settlement for criminals from Chili, after having been occupied for a half-century by Spanish vine-growers.
Some of them were not examples of deportment and good breeding; they were gentlemen who had spent all their lives in little castles in Angoumois and Poitou, a kind of noble ploughmen, who had only their silver swords to distinguish them from their vine-growers and herds.
The government was obliged to yield to a sturdy people backed up by seven or eight thousand vine-growers, who had burned all the archives, also the offices of "indirect taxation," and had dragged through the streets a customs officer, crying out at every street lantern, "Let us hang him here!"
M. Van Renen, whom we found on the premises, after exhibiting the different wines, took us over the place, and showed us a collection of the different aborigines of South Africa, in statuary. There were Kaffirs, Hottentots, Fingoes, Betjouanas, and Boschmen. M. V. deprecated the abolition of slavery as a great injury to the agriculturists and vine-growers of the colony.
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