There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besancon, and the
old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the
corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the
remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are
in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in
winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters
vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he
could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of
the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of
rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp
air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed
through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where
some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies.
Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a
little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account
for the strange appearance of _pommes de terre au naturel_.
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