air.
Marcel had frankly told th' unhappy truth; Nathless,
The devil had an awful power,
And ignorance was still his dower.
Some feared for bride and bridegroom yet; and guess
At strange mischance. "In the night cries were heard,"
Others had seen some shadows on the wall, in wondrous ways.
Lives Pascal yet? None dares to dress
The spicy broth,{11} to leave beside the nuptial door;
And so another hour goes o'er.
Then floats a lovely strain of music overhead,
A sweet refrain oft heard before,
'Tis the aoubado{12} offered to the newly-wed.

So the door opes at last, and the young pair was seen,
She blushed before the folk, but friendly hand and mien,
The fragments of her garter gives,
And every woman two receives;
Then winks and words of ruth from eye and lip are passed,
And luck of proud Pascal makes envious all at last,
For the poor lads, whose hearts are healed but slightly,
Of their first fervent pain,
When they see Franconnette, blossoming rose-light brightly,
All dewy fresh, so sweet and sightly,
They cry aloud, "We'll ne'er believe a Sorcerer again!"

Endnotes to FRANCONNETTE.

{1} Blaise de Montluc, Marshal of France, was one of the bitterest
persecutors of the Hugueuots. Towards the end of the sixteenth century,
Agen was a centre of Protestantism. The town was taken again and again
by the contending religious factions. When Montluc retook the place, in
1562, from Truelle, the Huguenot captain, he found that the inhabitants
had fled, and there was no one to butcher (Gascogne et Languedoc, par
Paul Joanne, p. 95). Montluc made up for his disappointment by laying
waste the country between Fumel and Penne, towns to the north of Agen,
and slaying all the Huguenots--men, women, and children--on whom he
could lay his hands. He then returned to his castle of Estillac, devoted
himself to religious exercises, and "took the sacrament," says Jasmin,
"while his hands were dripping with fraternal blood." Montluc died in
1577, and was buried in the garden of Estillac, where a monument, the
ruins of which still exist', was erected over his remains.

{2} Jour de Dieu!

{3} Wehr-wolves, wizard wolves--loup-garou. Superstitions respecting
them are known in Brittany and the South of France.

{4} Miss Harriett W. Preston, in her article on Jasmin's Franconnette in
the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1876, says: "The buscou, or busking,
was a kind of bee