194 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



lowest, being singularly acceptable through their own 

 attractive qualities, and widely known through reports 

 of their largely unostentatious charitable acts. Sir 

 Rutherford was President of the Royal Geographical 

 Society for the usual term, and we saw much of him 

 and his family at various times, eating our Christmas 

 dinner with them on three or four occasions. 



Of many pleasant meetings I will only mention 

 one, when we, in company with Sir Lewis and Lady 

 Pelly, made an interesting tour in the South of France 

 from Royat, by that curious natural formation Mont- 

 pelier le Vieux, round to Avignon. The valley of the 

 Tarn had recently been made accessible to tourists, 

 and I was particularly desirous of seeing its wonders, 

 so our party stopped at Millau to give] me an oppor- 

 tunity of going to the Tarn River for a long day by 

 myself. First some distance had to be travelled by 

 railroad, then some miles by a two-wheeled vehicle 

 across the bare Gausses, a high limestone upland, down 

 to the beautifully clear Tarn. Every shower that falls 

 on the Gausses percolates through deep ''swallows," 

 and finds its way for perhaps 2000 feet vertically 

 through them, issuing from the cliffs as feeders of 

 pure water to the little river. 



I was put into a flat-bottomed boat with stalwart 

 boatmen fore and aft, and so dropped down stream. 

 The water was at first so shallow and transparent as 

 to be scarcely visible. The boat seemed to be buoyed 

 in the air above the clean, shingly bottom. So we 

 glided down hour after hour, with vast cliffs on either 

 side clothed sparsely with pre-Rafaelite-looking trees, 

 and with an occasional eagle soaring in the blue sky 

 overhead. Then the river by slow degrees grew 



