us air. The stripling girl would sometimes
laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
sitting in judgment over the last. "No, no," she would say, "that is not
it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try
again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in
a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it was a
long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old
lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.

One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing
so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman
of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by
way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young,
dressed like a lady and avoided _patois_ like a weakness, commonly
addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the
swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a
village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet
ended when I had finished it and took my departure. It is true she had
a right to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the
worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river,
and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and
silent air of the morning. In