Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
Living beings no longer existed for us; the forests were changed into what looked like grassy plains; the ranges of the Cantal and the Cevennes had disappeared; we looked in vain for the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees seemed only a long series of piles of snow, connected at their bases.
I had learned by experience that the precise acreage of these highland farms is seldom to be arrived at, the size of a holding in the Lozere and the Cantal often being computed by the heads of stock kept. He informed me that he owned four hundred hectares, that is to say, nearly a thousand acres, a considerable portion of which consisted of rocky waste or scant pasturage.
A lover will spend two whole months, if necessary, in planning the construction of the mouse-trap. I have seen the most cunning men on earth thus taken in. There was a certain retired lawyer of Normandy. He lived in the little town of B , where a regiment of the chasseurs of Cantal were garrisoned.
Affairs of some importance had detained the family in Paris longer than their wont; but when September came, and they were able to leave town at last for an estate in Auvergne, her father entreated me to spend a couple of months with them in an old chateau hidden away among the mountains of Cantal. I paused before accepting this friendly invitation.
They are to be met with not only in those parts of France from which the above specimens have been taken and described, but also in Var, Bouches du Rhone, Aveyron, Gard, Lozere, Cantal, Charente, Vienne, &c. There is a good deal of sameness in the appearance of those still inhabited a walled face, a mask, with window and door, and above a chimney of brick rising out of the rock.
One of my pleasantest experiences, indeed, of French rural life, is that of an afternoon visit paid to a farmer in the neighbourhood of Aurillac. No well-bred gentleman, no lady accustomed to society, could have received an entire stranger with more urbanity, kindliness and grace, than did this peasant of the Cantal and his wife.
Measuring the old craters formed by the first eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, we find them little more than three miles in breadth. In France the circle of Cantal measures six miles across; at Ceyland the circle of the island is forty miles, which is considered the largest on the globe. What are these diameters against that of Clavius, which we overlook at this moment?"
Adjoining such large holdings are small freeholds farmed by their peasant owners dairy farms of a few acres, market-gardens of one or two, and so on. Metayage, or the system of half-profits, is rarely found in the Cantal.
The Hotel du Cantal was one of the dirtiest lodging houses that I had ever seen and I had seen some pretty dirty ones! But what the old woman said was worth considering, besides we could not be particular. I had not found my family in their beautiful Paris mansion yet. Mattia had been right to want to get all the money we could on our way to the city.
What are the affinities which unite the productions of modern volcanoes with the basalts, the phonolites, and those porphyries with bases of feldspar, which are without quartz, and which cover the Cordilleras of Peru and Mexico, as well as the small groups of the Monts Dores, of Cantal, and of Mezen in France?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking