ght and
wholly unornamented, were covered with a coating of white plaister,
which time had soiled and cracked. The vestibule was reached by
ascending five stone steps, surmounted by a rustic balustrade of rusty
iron. A yard surrounded by outhouses, where the harvest was gathered
in, presses for the vintage, cellars for the wine, and a dove-cote,
abutted on the house. Behind was levelled a small kitchen-garden, whose
beds were bordered with box, pinks, and fruit trees, pruned close down
to the ground. An arbour was formed at the extremity of each walk. A
little further on was an orchard, where the trees inclining in a
thousand attitudes, cast a degree of shade over an acre of cropped
grass; then a large enclosure of low vines, cut in right lines by small
green sward paths. Such is this spot. The gaze is turned from the gloomy
and lowering horizon to the mountains of Beaujeu, spotted on their sides
by black pines, and severed by large inclined meadows, where the oxen of
Charolais fatten, and to the valley of the Saone, that immense ocean of
verdure, here and there topped by high steeples. The belt of the higher
Alps, covered with snow and the apex of Mont Blanc, which overhangs the
whole, frame this extensive landscape. There is in this something of the
vastness of the infinite sea: and if on its bounded side it may inspire
recollection and resignation, in its open part it seems to solicit
thought to expand, and to convey the soul to far off hopes and to the
eminences of imagination.

Such was, for five years, the bounded horizon of this young woman. It
was there that she plunged into the plenitude of that nature of which,
in her infancy, she had so frequently dreamed, and in which she had
perceived only some small bits of sky, and some confused perspectives of
royal forests, from the height of her window over the roofs of Paris. It
was there that her simple tastes and loving soul found nutriment and
scope for her sensibility.

Her life was there divided between household cares, the improvement of
her mind, and active charity--that cultivator of the heart. Adored by
the peasants, whose protectress she was, she applied to the consolation
of their miseries the little to spare which a rigid economy left to her,
and to the cure of their maladies the knowledge she had acquired in
medicine. She was fetched from three and four leagues' distance to visit
a sick person. On Sunday the steps of her court-yard were covered with
inv