course, and it roars and tumbles savagely over the obstruction. A French guide-book asserts that at the spot an English lady, the Lady Clara, standing on the bridge, recited the celebrated soliloquy of Hamlet, in this fashion: "To die, to slip!" and then flung herself into the abyss. No such an incident ever occurred there.
The Brêche de Roland, a gash in the high ridge of snow and rock above Gavarnie, now becomes visible, as Pragnères is reached, but it is invisible from Gavarnie itself.
The story goes that Roland hacked this opening in the rock with his sword Durandal in the hopes of breaking the blade, so that the Saracens might not get possession of it at his death. But the tale has been transferred hither from Roncevaux. It is certainly curious to note how that legends of Roland have attached themselves to numerous places in the Pyrenees from west to east. He occupies there the place that King Arthur does in England, Scotland, and Wales. We have seen how that at S. Savin he was said to have fought with giants. Now it is a curious fact that according to tradition Vizos, near Luz, was occupied by a race of giants called Empresous, les Preux, and that representatives of them remained on there till the end of the eighteenth century. The Revolution seems to have cut them down, for we hear of no others since then. In the Archives of Luz is a record of the death of an Empresou named Barèque, in 1771, at the age of a hundred and ten. These giants had a cemetery of their own, and a baptistery of their own. They seem to have been regarded with something like the repulsion with which the Cagots were considered. In the churchyard have been turned up human bones of extraordinary size.
The valley or gorge of the Gave has been much belauded and often described. This naturally has produced
