a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little river
to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these two hills he
enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the dam, which
he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the soil which had
to be removed to make a channel for the river and the irrigation canals.

When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake above his dam he
was owner of the two hills, but not of the upper valley thus flooded,
through which there had been at all times a right-of-way to where it
ends in a horseshoe under the Dent de Vilard. But this ferocious old man
was so widely dreaded, that so long as he lived no claim was urged by
the inhabitants of Riceys, the little village on the further side of
the Dent de Vilard. When the Baron died, he left the slopes of the two
Rouxey hills joined by a strong wall, to protect from inundation the two
lateral valleys opening into the valley of Rouxey, to the right and left
at the foot of the Dent de Vilard. Thus he died the master of the Dent
de Vilard.

His heirs asserted their protectorate of the village of Riceys, and so
maintained the usurpation. The old assassin, the old renegade, the old
Abbe Watteville, ended his career by planting trees and making a fine
road over the shoulder of one of the Rouxey hills to join the highroad.
The estate belonging to this park and house was extensive, but badly
cultivated; there were chalets on both hills and neglected forests
of timber. It was all wild and deserted, left to the care of nature,
abandoned to chance growths, but full of sublime and unexpected beauty.
You may now imagine les Rouxey.

It is unnecessary to complicate this story by relating all the
prodigious trouble and the inventiveness stamped with genius, by which
Rosalie achieved her end without allowing it to be suspected. It is
enough to say that it was in obedience to her mother that she left
Besancon in the month of May 1835, in an antique traveling carriage
drawn by a pair of sturdy hired horses, and accompanied her father to
les Rouxey.

To a young girl love lurks in everything. When she rose, the morning
after her arrival, Mademoiselle de Watteville saw from her bedroom
window the fine expanse of water, from which the light mists rose like
smoke, and were caught in the firs and larches, rolling up and along the
hills till they reached the heights, and she gave a cry of admiration.

"They loved by the lakes! _S