h the tale of her past splendors. Unluckily, her
husband had not the same source of distraction.

However, everything went well at first. It was midsummer, and M. Chebe,
always in his shirt-sleeves, was busily employed in getting settled.
Each nail to be driven in the house was the subject of leisurely
reflections, of endless discussions. It was the same with the garden.
He had determined at first to make an English garden of it, lawns always
green, winding paths shaded by shrubbery. But the trouble of it was that
it took so long for the shrubbery to grow.

"I have a mind to make an orchard of it," said the impatient little man.

And thenceforth he dreamed of nothing but vegetables, long lines of
beans, and peach-trees against the wall. He dug for whole mornings,
knitting his brows in a preoccupied way and wiping his forehead
ostentatiously before his wife, so that she would say:

"For heaven's sake, do rest a bit--you're killing yourself."

The result was that the garden was a mixture: flowers and fruit, park
and kitchen garden; and whenever he went into Paris M. Chebe was careful
to decorate his buttonhole with a rose from his rose-bushes.

While the fine weather lasted, the good people did not weary of admiring
the sunsets behind the fortifications, the long days, the bracing
country air. Sometimes, in the evening, when the windows were open,
they sang duets; and in presence of the stars in heaven, which began to
twinkle simultaneously with the lanterns on the railway around the city,
Ferdinand would become poetical. But when the rain came and he could not
go out, what misery! Madame Chebe, a thorough Parisian, sighed for
the narrow streets of the Marais, her expeditions to the market of
Blancs-Manteaux, and to the shops of the quarter.

As she sat by the window, her usual place for sewing and observation,
she would gaze at the damp little garden, where the volubilis and the
nasturtiums, stripped of their blossoms, were dropping away from the
lattices with an air of exhaustion, at the long, straight line of the
grassy slope of the fortifications, still fresh and green, and, a
little farther on, at the corner of a street, the office of the Paris
omnibuses, with all the points of their route inscribed in enticing
letters on the green walls. Whenever one of the omnibuses lumbered away
on its journey, she followed it with her eyes, as a government clerk at
Cayenne or Noumea gazes after the steamer about to return t