it's a
piastre to a sou that you stood gawping in through a window while
gentlemen and ladies did the dancing. I can imagine how you looked--I
can!" and with this she took her prodigious bulk at a waddling gait out
of the room. "I remember how you danced even when you were not clumsy
as a pig on ice!" she shrieked back over her shoulder.

"Parbleu! true enough, my dear," he called after her, "I should think
you could--you mind how we used trip it together. You were the
prettiest dancer them all, and the young fellows all went to the swords
about you!"

"But tell me more," Alice insisted; "I want to know about what you saw
in the great towns--in the fine houses--how the ladies looked, how they
acted--what they said--the dresses they wore--how--"

"Ciel! you will split my ears, child; can't you fill my pipe and bring
it to me with a coal on it? Then I'll try to tell you what I can," he
cried, assuming a humorously resigned air. "Perhaps if I smoke I can
remember everything."

Alice gladly ran to do what he asked. Meantime Jean was out on the
gallery blowing a flute that M. Roussillon had brought him from Quebec.

The pipe well filled and lighted apparently did have the effect to
steady and encourage M. Roussillon's memory; or if not his memory, then
his imagination, which was of that fervid and liberal sort common to
natives of the Midi, and which has been exquisitely depicted by the
late Alphonse Daudet in Tartarin and Bompard. He leaned far back in a
strong chair, with his massive legs stretched at full length, and gazed
at the roof-poles while he talked.

He sympathized fully, in his crude way, with Alice's lively curiosity,
and his affection for her made him anxious to appease her longing after
news from the great outside world. If the sheer truth must come out,
however, he knew precious little about that world, especially the
polite part of it in which thrived those femininities so dear to the
heart of an isolated and imaginative girl. Still, as he, too, lived in
Arcadia, there was no great effort involved when he undertook to blow a
dreamer's flute.

In the first place he had not been in Quebec or Montreal during his
absence from home. Most of the time he had spent disposing of pelts and
furs at Detroit and in extending his trading relations with other
posts; but what mattered a trifling want of facts when his meridional
fancy once began to warm up? A smattering of social knowledge gained at
first hand in h