,
exhausted, into the carriage, and was borne away to his bride.

'A lively prospect for poor Pelagie.' 'What a little fiend he is!'
'Spinsters for ever!'

With these remarks, the ladies ordered their own equipage, an infant
omnibus, much in vogue in Dinan, where retired army officers, English or
Scotch, drive about with their little families of eighteen or twenty.
One Colonel Newcome, a grave-looking man, used to come to church in a
bus of this sort, with nine daughters and four sons, like a patriarch.
The strangers thought it was a boarding-school, till he presented the
entire flock, with paternal pride, as 'my treasures.'

Madame C., in a large Leghorn bonnet, trembling with yellow bows, led
the way with an air of lofty indifference as to what became of her house
that day. Marie bore a big basket, full of cold fowls, salad, and wines;
she also was in a new spring hat of purple, which made her rosy old
face look like a china aster. Lavinia reposed upon the other seat; and
the infants insisted on sharing the driver's seat, up aloft, that they
might enjoy the prospect, which freak caused Flabeau's boy to beam and
blush till his youthful countenance was a deep scarlet.

They had a pleasant day; for good old Madame soon recovered her temper,
and beguiled the time with lively tales of her mother's trials during
the Revolution.

Marie concocted spiced drinks, salad that was a thing to dream of, not
to tell, and produced such edible treasures that her big basket seemed
bottomless.

The frisky damsels explored ruins, ran races on the hard beach, sniffed
the salt breezes, and astonished the natives by swarming up and down
'precipices,' as they called the rocks.

That was a fatal day for Flabeau's boy (they never knew his name); for,
as if the wedding had flown to his head, he lost his youthful heart to
one of the lively damsels who invaded his perch. Such tender glances as
his China-blue eyes cast upon her; such grins of joy as he gave when she
spoke to him; such feats of agility as he performed, leaping down to
gather flowers, or hurling himself over thorny hedges, to point out a
_dolmen_ or a _menhir_ (they never could remember which was which).
Alas, alas! for Flabeau's boy! Deeply was he wounded that day by the
unconscious charmer, who would as soon have thought of inspiring love in
the bosom of the broken-nosed saint by the wayside as in the heart that
beat under the blue blouse.

I regret to say that 'the infan