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When the discovery was made that a bottle was enshrined among the flowers, and that upon the bottle was an inscription necessarily a sonnet, as we impulsively decided our feeling toward Serrières was of the warmest. Without question, those generous creatures had sent us of their best, and with a posy of verse straight from their honest hearts.
And all Tournon, the while, stood above us on a terrace and sympathetically looked on. In its adaptation to the needs of travelling poets the breakfast was a master-stroke. It was simple, substantial, delicious; and in its accompanying prodigal outpouring of red and white Hermitage, Cornas, and Saint-Péray, the contrast with the bottle-niggardliness of Serrières was bravely marked.
Passing Serrieres, with pastures and meadows close to the water's edge, and groups of cattle grazing under the trees, we reach Annonay, crested by a quaint ruin, the birth-place of the great balloonists, the brothers Montgolfier. The first balloon ascent was made from this little town in 1783. Boissy d'Anglas, the heroic president of the Assembly in its stormiest days, was also born here.
Only poets ministering to poets could have conceived so pretty a scheme. But the eager group that surrounded the Majoral who held the bottle flew asunder in wrath as he read out loudly, in place of the expected sonnet, these words: "Quinine prepared by Cuminat at Serrières"! And then our feeling toward Serrières grew much less warm.
But the people of Tournon to which generous town, and to the breakfast provided by its cordial inhabitants, we came an hour before noon entreated us with so prodigal a liberality in the matter of bottles that the questionable conduct of the Serrières apothecary quickly faded from our minds.
Another individual built the town-house, which is a handsome edifice of the Corinthian order. The little brook called the Serrieres, which does not run above the length of two gun-shots before it falls into the lake, turns a great number of mills of various kinds.
Amy, or another of the Southern sculptors, will be moved some day, I hope, to seize upon that thrilling group and to fasten it forever in enduring bronze. As we approached the bridge of Serrières it was evident that another demonstration in our honour was imminent.
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