The old walls at Nevers are not very complete, but what remain are wonderfully expressive. The Tour Gouguin and the Tour St. Eloi are notable examples, but they are completely overshadowed by the Porte du Croux, which is one of the best examples of the city gates which were so plentiful in the France of another day.

Above Nevers, Decize, Bourbon-Lancy, Gilly, and Digoin are mere names which mean nothing to the traveller by rail. They are busy towns of central France, where the bustle of their daily lives is of quite a different variety from that of the Ile de France, of Normandy, or of the Pas de Calais.

From Digoin to Roanne the Loire is followed by the Canal Latéral. Roanne is a not very pleasing, overgrown town which has become a veritable ville des ouvriers, all of whom are engaged in cloth manufacture.

Virtually, then, Roanne is not much more than a guide-post on the route to Le Puy—"the most picturesque place in the world"—and the wonderfully impressive region of the Cevennes and the Vivaris, where shepherds guard their flocks amid the solitudes.

Far above Le Puy, in a rocky gorge known as the Gerbier-de-Jonc, near Ste. Eulalie, in the Ardeche, rises the tiny Liger, which is the real source of the mighty Loire, that natural boundary which divides the north from the south and forms what the French geographers call "la bassin centrale de France."

THE END.

INDEX