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 
Couéron 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 Couéron, and especially at Pellerin, which 
stands high, these buttes come close to the river, which 
is eating them away. 
My visit to Couéron, which was made on a warm 
midsummer’s day in 1918, 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 
