Welcome back, everyone to 1001 Stories for the Road.

This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardor.

Today, Chapter 26, The Pondugardin.

Here at our reading of the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas.

And now, our story continues.

Such of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to the south of France,

may perchance have noticed about midway between the town of Bucar and the

village of Belgaard, a little nearer to the former than to the latter, a small roadside inn,

from the front of which hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a grotesque

representation of the Pondugard.

This modern place of entertainment stood on the left-hand side of the post road, and backed upon

the rhone. It also boasted of what in Languedoc is styled a garden, consisting of a small

plot of ground on the side opposite to the main entrance reserved for the reception of guests.

A few dingy olives and stunted fig trees struggled hard for existence, but their withered,

dusty foliage abundantly proved how unequal was the conflict. Between these sickly shrubs grew a scanty

supply of garlic, tomatoes, and eschalots,

while lone and solitary, like a forgotten sentinel, a tall pine raised its melancholy head

in one of the corners of this unattractive spot and displayed its flexible stem and fan-shaped summit

dried and cracked by the fierce heat of the subtropical sun.

In the surrounding plain, which more resembled a dusty lake than solid ground, were scattered

a few miserable stalks of wheat, the effect, no doubt, of a curious desire on the part of the

agriculturalists of the country country to see whether such

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