mers that shaded the lustre of her
cheek, she was beautiful, and was still in the glow of youth by her
grace and her talent, and--her heart. Wherever she moved she left
crowds of Corydons and Alexises; but, luckily for M. Deshoulieres,
their whole conversation was about sheep.

The two Mesdemoiselles Deshoulieres, Madeleine and Bribri, were
beautiful girls of seventeen or eighteen, brought up in all the
innocent pastoralism of their mother. They believed in all the
poetical descriptions they read in her eclogues. They expected to
see shepherds playing on their pipes, and shepherdesses dancing, and
naiads reclining on the shady banks of clear-running rivers. They
were delighted to get out of the prosaic atmosphere of Paris, and
all the three were overjoyed when they sprang from their carriage,
one evening in May, at the chateau of Madame d'Urtis on the banks of
the Lignon. Though there were occasional showers at that season, the
mornings were splendid; and accordingly the travellers were up
almost by daylight, to tread the grass still trembling 'neath the
steps of Astrea--to see the fountain, that mirror where the
shepherdesses wove wild-flowers into their hair--and to explore the
wood, still vocal with the complaints of Celadon. In one of their
first excursions, Madeleine Deshoulieres, impatient to see some of
the scenes so gracefully described by her mother, asked if they were
really not to encounter a single shepherd on the banks of the Lignon?
Madame Deshoulieres perceived, at no great distance, a herdsman and
cow-girl playing at chuckfarthing; and, after a pause, replied--

"Behold upon the verdant grass so sweet,
The shepherdess is at her shepherd's feet!
Her arms are bare, her foot is small and white,
The very oxen wonder at the sight;
Her locks half bound, half floating in the air,
And gown as light as those that satyrs wear."

While these lines were given in Madame Deshoulieres' inimitable
recitative, the party had come close to the rustic pair. "People may
well say," muttered Madeleine, "that the pictures of Nature are
always best at a distance. Can it be possible that this is a
shepherdess--a shepherdess of Lignon?" The shepherdess was in
reality a poor little peasant girl, unkempt, unshorn, with hands of
prodigious size, a miraculous squint, and a mouth which probably had
a beginning, but of which it was impossible to say where it might
end. The shepherd was worthy of his companion; and y