138 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



swelled in recent years by the development of a large 

 industry for the treatment of lead; it is the shot tower 

 and forest of chimneys of these great metallurgical 

 works that arrest the eye of the traveler as he approaches 

 Coueron by river at the present day. The town is also 

 accessible by railroad, but the steamer journey from 

 Nantes, which is made in less than an hour, is more 

 attractive as well as more direct. In this section the 

 Loire is flanked on either side by bottom lands, reduced 

 in places to narrow strips, which are followed at inter- 

 vals by elevations called, by courtesy, hills or buttes. To 

 the west of Coueron, and especially at Pellerin, which 

 stands high, these buttes come close to the river, which 

 is eating them away. 



My visit to Coueron, which was made on a warm 

 midsummer's day in 1913, served to correct certain pre- 

 vious impressions, but I found the old Audubon home- 

 stead in its essential aspects but little changed, consid- 

 ering that over a century had rolled by since the nat- 

 uralist's visit which we have just described. After leav- 

 ing Nantes at the Gare de la Bourse by one of those 

 quaint little trains which still do service in the less trav- 

 eled parts of France, we traversed the broad Quai with 

 requisite deliberation, passing shops, warehouses and 

 factories in long array. A slight swerve from the river 

 soon brought us to Chatenay, now a part of the city; 

 it is still some distance from that point before the real 

 countryside is reached, and scenes familiar to southern 

 Brittany are in a measure reproduced. There were the 

 old farmhouses of rough stone, dear to every painter's 

 heart, mellowed by age and lichens, and surrounded by 

 great ricks of straw, for the harvest had been gathered 

 and the stubble fields were brown. There also the farms 

 were divided into small plats, marked by willows or 



