ines. The
house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial;
it is a very proper _gentilhommiere_. In a corner of the garden, at the
angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, the
_pigeonnier_, the old stone dovecote. It is a great round tower, as
broad of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an
extinguisher, and a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a
dove is always fluttering.

You see all this from the windows of the drawing-room. Be sure that the
drawing-room is pannelled in white and gray, with old rococo moulding
over the doorways and mantlepiece. The open garden gateway, with its
tangled vines, makes a frame for the picture that lies beyond the little
grassy esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to grow around a
disused stone well, placed at quaint remoteness from the house (if,
indeed, it is not a relic of an earlier habitation), a picture of a wide
green country rising beyond the unseen valley, and stretching away to a
far horizon in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other windows,
you look out on the gardens proper. There are places that take one's
fancy by some accident of expression, by some mystery of accident. This
one is high and breezy, both sunny and shady, plain yet picturesque,
extremely cheerful, and a little melancholy. It has what in the arts is
called "style," and so it took mine.

Going to call on the peasants was as charming an affair as a chapter in
one of George Sand's rural tales. I went one Sunday morning with my
hostess, who knew them well and engaged their most garrulous confidence.
I don't mean that they told her all their secrets, but they told her a
good many; if the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd
simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morning in August, when he is
stopping at home from work, and he has put on his best jacket and
trowsers, and is loafing at the door of his neighbor's cabin, he is a
very charming person. The peasantry in the region I speak of had
admirably good manners. The cure gave me a low account of their morals;
by which he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they were moderate
church-goers. But they have the instinct of civility and a talent for
conversation; they know how to play the host and the entertainer. By
"he," just now, I meant _she_ quite as much; it is rare that, in
speaking superlatively of the French, in any connection, one does not
think of the