ut on the Board of our
Agricultural Society. Do not laugh, unless at the common vanity of
mankind."

CHAPTER XXV.

THE LOW-COUNTRY SUNRISE.

"Chacun son gout. Moi, j'aime mieux la nature primitive qui n'est pas a
la mode du jour mais que l'on ne pourra jamais demoder ... J'aime ce que
j'aime, et vous, vous aimez autre chose. Grand bien vous fasse--je vous
admire, Monsieur Tout-le-Monde."

--Ben Sulte

"I am going to rise before the sun to-morrow. Would you like to come out
fishing?" remarked Haviland, cheerfully, on the way home. Chrysler
signified assent.

At grey dawn, before it was yet quite daybreak, they were on the road.
All the houses in the neighbourhood looked asleep. Heavy dews lay upon
the grass. The scene was chilly, and a little comfortless and suggestive
of turning back to bed.

"Where are we going?" the visitor asked, trying to collect his spirits.

"To find Bonhomme Le Brun, who superintends the boating
interest.--'Bonhomme'--'Good Man'--is a kind of jocular name we give to
every simple old fellow. 'Le Brun' is not quite correct either. His real
name--or rather the only one extant among the _noms-de-guerre_ of his
predecessors, is Vadeboncoeur--'Go willingly,' which the Notaries I
suppose would write 'Vadeboncoeur _dit_ Le Brun.'"

Notwithstanding the early hour they were not alone on the road. A
wrinkled woman, bent almost double, was toiling slowly along with heavy
sighs, under a sack of firewood.

"See here, madame," Charnilly called out, stepping forward to her,
"give me the sack;" which he unloaded from her back and threw over his
shoulder.

"You are always so good, monseigneur Chamilly," the old woman groaned in
a plaintive, palsied voice, without straightening her doubled frame.

"Is the Bonhomme at the house?" he enquired.

"I think not, sir; he was preparing to go to Isle of Ducks."

"Just where I thought," exclaimed Haviland in English. "This Le Brun is
of the oddest class--a secular hermit on the solitudes of the river--a
species of mystery to the others. Sometimes he is seen paddling among
the islands far down; sometimes seining a little, by methods invented by
himself; sometimes carrying home an old gun and more or less loaded with
ducks; sometimes his torch is seen far out in the dark, night-fishing;
but few meet him face to face besides myself. When a boy I used to think
he lived on the water because his legs were crooked, though more
probably his legs are crooke