ole, and everything is known; where the values of personalty
and real estate is quoted like stocks on the vast sheet of the
newspaper--before his arrival he had been weighed in the unerring scales
of Bayeusaine judgment.

His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out the amount of
his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, had produced the family
tree, and expatiated on the talents, breeding, and modesty of this
particular branch. So he received the precise amount of attentions
to which he was entitled; he was accepted as a worthy scion of a good
stock; and, for he was but twenty-three, was made welcome without
ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers of daughters looked
not unkindly upon him.

He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land in the valley of
the Auge; and sooner or later his father, as in duty bound, would leave
him the chateau of Manerville, with the lands thereunto belonging.
As for his education, political career, personal qualities, and
qualifications--no one so much as thought of raising the questions. His
land was undeniable, his rentals steady; excellent plantations had been
made; the tenants paid for repairs, rates, and taxes; the apple-trees
were thirty-eight years old; and, to crown all, his father was in treaty
for two hundred acres of woodland just outside the paternal park, which
he intended to enclose with walls. No hopes of a political career, no
fame on earth, can compare with such advantages as these.

Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe omitted to
mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor did Gaston himself say a
word about him. But, at the same time, it is true that the brother
was consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
lamented and forgotten.

At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of the circle. He
drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits of these
folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses, their
crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
"Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters.
For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy
gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew
tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it
had well begun. He drifted on till he reached