ble and went to fetch the required donkeys.

The violet gleam cast by the pitch candle was not powerful enough
to counteract the fitful moonlight, which touched the dark floor and
furniture of the smoke-blackened cottage with luminous points. The
little boy had lifted his pretty head inquisitively, and above it two
cows were poking their rosy muzzles and brilliant eyes through the holes
in the stable wall. The big dog, whose countenance was by no means the
least intelligent of the family, seemed to be examining the strangers
with as much curiosity as the little boy. A painter would have stopped
to admire the night effects of this scene, but Marie, not wishing to
enter into conversation with Barbette, who sat up in bed and began to
show signs of amazement at recognizing her, left the hovel to escape
its fetid air and the questions of its mistress. She ran quickly up the
stone staircase behind the cottage, admiring the vast details of the
landscape, the aspect of which underwent as many changes as spectators
made steps either upward to the summits or downward to the valleys.
The moonlight was now enveloping like a luminous mist the valley of
Couesnon. Certainly a woman whose heart was burdened with a despised
love would be sensitive to the melancholy which that soft brilliancy
inspires in the soul, by the weird appearance it gives to objects and
the colors with which it tints the streams.

The silence was presently broken by the braying of a donkey. Marie went
quickly back to the hut, and the party started. Galope-Chopine, armed
with a double-barrelled gun, wore a long goatskin, which gave him
something the look of Robinson Crusoe. His blotched face, seamed with
wrinkles, was scarcely visible under the broad-brimmed hat which the
Breton peasants still retain as a tradition of the olden time; proud to
have won, after their servitude, the right to wear the former ornament
of seignorial heads. This nocturnal caravan, protected by a guide whose
clothing, attitudes, and person had something patriarchal about them,
bore no little resemblance to the Flight into Egypt as we see it
represented by the sombre brush of Rembrandt. Galope-Chopine carefully
avoided the main-road and guided the two women through the labyrinth of
by-ways which intersect Brittany.

Mademoiselle de Verneuil then understood the Chouan warfare. In
threading these complicated paths, she could better appreciate the
condition of a country which when she saw it