icturesque, and the _trappistine_, which is a
distilled liquor of the _Chartreuse_ family, is much prized by people
who take a little glass after their coffee. By the time I had done with
the Abbey, the townsfolk had slid _en masse_ down the cliff again, the
yellow afternoon had come, and the holiday takers, before the
wine-shops, made long and lively shadows. I hired a sort of two-wheeled
gig, without a board, and drove back to Etretal in the rosy stage of
evening. The gig dandled me up and down in a fashion of which I had been
unconscious since I left off baby-clothes; but the drive, through the
charming Norman country, over roads which lay among the peaceful meadows
like paths amid a park, was altogether delightful. The sunset gave a
deeper mellowness to the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of
the wayside villages the young men and maidens were dancing like the
figures in vignette illustrations of classic poets.

II.

You may say there is nothing in this very commonplace adventure to
sentimentalize about, and that when one plucks sentimentally a brand
from the burning one should pick out a more valuable one. I certainly
call it a picked day, at any rate, when I went to breakfast at St.
Jouin, at the beautiful Ernestine's. Don't be alarmed; if I was just now
too tame, I am not turning wild. The beautiful Ernestine is not my
especial beauty, but every one's, and to contemplate her charms you have
only to order breakfast. They shine forth the more brilliantly in
proportion as your order is liberal, and Ernestine is beautiful
according as your bill is large. In this case she comes and smiles,
really very handsomely, around your table, and you feel some hesitation
in accusing so well-favored a person of extortion. She keeps an inn at
the end of a lane which diverges from the high road between Etretal and
Havre, and it is an indispensable feature of your "station" at the
former place that you choose some fine morning and seek her hospitality.
She has been a celebrity these twenty years, and is no longer a simple
maiden in her flower; but twenty years, if they have diminished her
early bloom, have richly augmented her _musee_. This is a collection of
all the verses and sketches, the autographs, photographs, monographs,
and trinkets presented to the amiable hostess by admiring tourists. It
covers the walls of her sitting-room and fills half a dozen big albums
which you look at while breakfast is being pre