[CHAPTER XVIII]
The little town of Verdun sur le Doubs has no particular attraction for the archæologist nor for the tourist, yet it is a place with which all visitors to Beaune who wish to keep themselves in touch with the real Burgundy, with the life of the village and the ville de Canton, as well as with the larger movements of the great cities, cannot afford to neglect.
For myself, the little town will always be associated with happy souvenirs, and with gracious pictures of country life, as it has been since first I rode there, on a warm September afternoon, along a pleasant, undulating road, through typical, low-lying lands of fertile Burgundy, sometimes running quite straight for several kilometres, sometimes curving slightly through golden vineyards, and fields of bearded maize, and crimson clover. I passed through St. Loup, a village with a delightful Romanesque church, and through other attractive hamlets crowned with Gothic towers; by hay fields, where a late second crop was being taken in, by rich arable lands, where yoked oxen were ploughing with attendant women clearing the way for the plough-share with a stick. I passed patches of fragrant wild flowers, and ill weeds growing in tangled masses by the road side, by rich grasses that lean cattle were stolidly munching.
One of the boys who looked after them was singing a song. I could not catch the words exactly, nor the air, but I fitted the snatch of melody to the best of all Burgundian folk-songs, an exquisite little poem with a curious and very pretty history, that I am going to tell. This is the song. It is sung to-day, with local variations, not by the shepherds of Burgundy only, but throughout all France almost; in Dauphiné, in Champagne, in the lonely forests of the Ardennes.
Eho! ého! ého! Les agneaux vont aux plaines, Eho! ého! ého! Et les loups sont aux bos.
Tant qu'aux bords des fontaines, Ou dans les frais ruisseaux Les moutons baign'nt leur laine, I dansont au préau. Eho! ého! ého!