clumps of
ash and alder, and a rare farm-habitation standing amid orchards and
hemp-fields, or a rarer hamlet of a dozen cottages grouped together. The
country is flat, and, viewed from the rail or high road, unimpressive.
But those fruitful fields have a placid beauty, and it needs but to
penetrate the sequestered lanes and explore the thicket-bound courses of
the streams, to meet with plenty of those pleasant solitudes after a
poet's own heart, whose gift is to seize and perpetuate transient
effects, and to open the eyes of duller minds to charms that might pass
unnoticed. In this sense only can George Sand be said to have idealized
for us the landscapes she loved.

The thoughtful, poetic side of her temperament showed itself early,
leading her to seek long intervals of solitude, when she would bury
herself in books or dreams, to satisfy the cravings of her intellect and
imagination. On the other hand, her vigorous physical organization kept
alive her taste for active amusements and merry companionship. So the
child-squire romped on equal terms with the little rustics of Nohant,
sharing their village sports and the occupations of the seasons as they
came round: hay-making and gleaning in summer; in winter weaving
bird-nets to spread in the snowy fields for the wholesale capture of
larks; anon listening with mixed terror and delight to the picturesque
legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they sat at their work out of doors
on September moonlight evenings--to all the traditional ghost-stories of
the "Black Valley," as she fancifully christened the country round
about. Tales were these of fantastic animals and goblins, the
_grand'-bete_ and the _levrette blanche_, Georgeon, that imp of
mischief, night apparitions of witches and charmers of wolves, singing
Druidical stones and mysterious portents--a whole fairy mythology, then
firmly believed in by the superstitious peasantry.

As a signal contrast to this way of life came for a time the annual
visits to Paris--suspended after she was ten years old. There liberty
ended, and the girl was transported into a novel and most uncongenial
sphere. Her grandmother's friends and relatives were mostly old people,
who clung to antiquated modes and customs; and distinguished though such
circles might be, the youngest member only found out that they were
intolerably dull. The wrinkled countesses with their elaborate toilettes
and ceremonious manners, the _abbes_ with their fashionabl