night-shirt.

"So our keepers sleep till this time of day!" thought the Parisian, who
thought himself very knowing in rural customs.

After a walk of about quarter of an hour, he reached the sources of
the river above Conches, where his ravished eyes beheld one of those
landscapes that ought to be described, like the history of France, in a
thousand volumes or in only one. We must here content ourselves with two
paragraphs.

A projecting rock, covered with dwarf trees and abraded at its base by
the Avonne, to which circumstance it owes a slight resemblance to an
enormous turtle lying across the river, forms an arch through which
the eye takes in a little sheet of water, clear as a mirror, where
the stream seems to sleep until it reaches in the distance a series of
cascades falling among huge rocks, where little weeping willows with
elastic motion sway back and forth to the flow of waters.

Beyond these cascades is the hillside, rising sheer, like a Rhine rock
clothed with moss and heather, gullied like it, again, by sharp ridges
of schist and mica sending down, here and there, white foaming rivulets
to which a little meadow, always watered and always green, serves as a
cup; farther on, beyond the picturesque chaos and in contrast to this
wild, solitary nature, the gardens of Conches are seen, with the village
roofs and the clock-tower and the outlying fields.

There are the two paragraphs, but the rising sun, the purity of the air,
the dewy sheen, the melody of woods and waters--imagine them!

"Almost as charming as at the Opera," thought Blondet, making his way
along the banks of the unnavigable portion of the Avonne, whose caprices
contrast with the straight and deep and silent stream of the lower
river, flowing between the tall trees of the forest of Les Aigues.

Blondet did not proceed far on his morning walk, for he was presently
brought to a stand-still by the sight of a peasant,--one of those who,
in this drama, are supernumeraries so essential to its action that it
may be doubted whether they are not in fact its leading actors.

When the clever journalist reached a group of rocks where the main
stream is imprisoned, as it were, between two portals, he saw a man
standing so motionless as to excite his curiosity, while the clothes and
general air of this living statue greatly puzzled him.

The humble personage before him was a living presentment of the old
men dear to Charlet's pencil; resembling the tro