The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees, by Edwin Asa Dix

Title: A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees

Author: Edwin Asa Dix

Release Date: January 26, 2005 [eBook #14812]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MIDSUMMER DRIVE THROUGH THE PYRENEES ***

E-text prepared by Carlo Traverso, Susan Skinner,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
from images generously made available by the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr

A DIFFICULT BIT ON THE ROUTE THERMALE.

A MIDSUMMER DRIVE THROUGH THE PYRENEES

BY

EDWIN ASA DIX, M.A.

EX-FELLOW IN HISTORY OF THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY AT PRINCETON

ILLUSTRATED

New York & London
G. P. Putnam's Sons
The Knickerbocker Press

1890

"How comes it to pass," wondered a traveler, over twenty years ago, "that, when the American people think it worth while to pay a visit to Europe almost exclusively to see Switzerland and Italy; when in 1860 twenty-one thousand Americans visited Rome and only seven thousand English; so few should think it worth while to visit the Pyrenees? It is certainly the only civilized country we have visited without finding Americans there before us. Is it accident or caprice, or part of a system of leaving it to the last,—which 'last' never comes? The feast is provided,—where are the guests? The French Pyrenees form one of the loveliest gardens in Europe and a perfect place for a summer holiday. 'La beauté ici est sereine et le plaisir est pur.'"

The query is still unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean, to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees—a garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,—almost alone remain by our nation of travelers unvisited and unknown.

CONTENTS.