Route 31.Via Castelnaudary, Carcassone, Narbonne, La Nouvelle, Salses, and Rivesaltes.

The parade overand a pleasant sight it was, and one not easily to be forgottenwe were away to see the Salse, or 'mud-volcano,' near Monkey Town, in the forest to the south-east.

We had some difficulty in finding our quest, the Salse, or mud- volcano.

Now and then this 'Salse,' so quiet when we saw it, is said to be seized with a violent paroxysm.

In the autumn of last year, some such explosion is said to have taken place at the Cedros Salse, a place so remote, unfortunately, that I could not visit it.

The Negroes and Coolies, the story goes, came running to the overseer at the noise, assuring him that something terrible had happened; and when he, in defiance of their fears, went off to the Salse, he found that many tons of mudI was told thousandshad been thrown out.

But Messrs. Wall and Sawkins saw with their own eyes, in 1856, about two miles from this Cedros Salse, the results of an explosion which had happened only two months before, and of which they give a drawing.

There is a third Salse near Poole River, on the Upper Ortoire, which is extinct, or at least quiescent; but this, also, I could not visit.

As for the causes of these Salses, I fear the reader must be content, for the present, with a somewhat muddy explanation of the muddy mystery.

'There is,' they say, 'easy gradation from the smaller Salses to the ordinary naphtha or petroleum springs.'

The mud-volcano of Saman, in the Western Caucasus, gives off, with a continual stream of thick mud, ignited gases, accompanied with mimic earthquakes like those of the Trinidad Salses; and this out of a soil said to be full of bituminous springs, and where (as in Trinidad) the tertiary strata carry veins of asphalt, or are saturated with naphtha.

Certainly not from the sea itself, which is distant, in the case of the Trinidad Salses, from two to seventeen miles.