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420 NOTICES OF BOOKS.
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Transcript
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
... Maitre Jpierre. Par Edmond About. A ...
will tell tlie Parisians all about it , and tliat they will help him to make roads with ditches on each sideand to cut his grand canal .
, The novelette part of the book ends happily , of course . M . About tells Pierre that Marinettewho certainly is not like the lady
, " who never told her love , " is dying , * and that , while he is attending to all sorfcs of secondary duties lie is neglecting- the primary one
of loving her who loves him so devotedly . The drainer-general awakens suddenly to a sense of his misconductand cries , " "Well ,
, you're going to write a book about me ; put into it that I had meant not to marry till my works were all over , so that I might give myself up
to her and live for nothing else : but say that you oj ) ened my eyes , and that I took the good which was given me when it came . " " At
last ! "says Marinette : and the traveller , embarrassed as he well might besnatches the whip from his driver ' s hands , lashes the horses ,
, and gallops off without saying good bye . They had been escorting hira . to the railway , walking on stilts beside the cart in which he
drove . "When he turns his head he sees a vast pair of compasses standing in the middle of the road : " it was ( stilted ) Marinette in
the arms of ( stilted ) Maitre Pierre . " Every one of us has heard something about these Xrandes of the
south-west coast of France , so different from the Landes or heaths of Brittany and parts of Normandy : any good map marks tlie
Bassin d'Areachon and the chain of pools stretching from it northwards to the Gironde * but few of us know much about the work
, now going on there . So many English people forget that no countryin Europe at any ratehas so little _tvaste ground , so little
, , really poor bad land , as our own island , that they will be a little startled to learn that the following is a very fair description of a
large part of two departments of fertile France : — "Itis mere sand , " said he ; " what gives it that color is decayed vegetable matter .
Everywhere it is the same , about two feet deep , * below it is a bed of reddish grey sandstone a foot thick , hard enough to blunt a good
pickaxe : a field with sucli a sub-soil is like a flower-pot with no hole in it . The land is flat ; the water can neither run down nor
fun off , so it floods the whole place till summer , and tlien as it dries up poisons us with every sort of fever except yellow fever . Tlie
well water ( supplied from just below the sandstone crust ) is yellow and unsavoury ; men and sheep drink sparingly of it , and yet the
sheep sometimes die of it . Below this sheet of yellow water we have sand , sand , jusqu'en enfer" such , is Maitre Pierre ' s description
of his Landes . His account of the dunes , the moving sand-hills , which were gaining on the land at the rate of a yard a year , pushing
before them the marsh water gathered at their base , which they prevented from , draining off into the sea , is very interesting :
villages have been swallowed up ; in several places a weathercock can be found by _scraiDing away a little of the sand which has buried a
church and townlet ; dykes were no good , nothing was found to
stop them but the maritime pine , whose long roots , twisted and
420 Notices Of Books.
420 NOTICES OF BOOKS .
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Feb. 1, 1862, page 420, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01021862/page/60/
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