They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from which innumerable
streams pour down to swell the Adour and the Garonne; and as one
rolls along, listening to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only
two roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, the
cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Revolution, over what was
open moor; and next the great natural parks which one traverses here
and there; the remnants of those forests which were once sacred to
the seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now,
and the game with them; and the forests are almost gone--so ruinate,
indeed, by the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) has
interfered to stop a destruction of timber, which involves the
destruction both of fire-wood and of the annual fall of rain. But
the trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly
mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, and firing
scarce; and the country method of obtaining it is to send a woman up
a tree, where she hacks off, with feeble arms and feeble tools,
boughs halfway out from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying
by letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, and
walnuts.
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