o!" cried Sonia, sticking into
the small hole made by the ball the bouquet of cyclamen with which she
had stroked her cheek.

With that charming trophy in his cap Tartarin returned to the landau.
The trumpet sounded, the convoy started, the horses went rapidly down to
Brienz along that marvellous corniche road, blasted in the side of the
rock, separated from an abyss of over a thousand feet by single stones
a couple of yards apart. But Tartarin was no longer conscious of danger;
no longer did he look at the scenery--that Meyringen valley, seen
through a light veil of mist, with its river in straight lines, the
lake, the villages massing themselves in the distance, and that whole
horizon of mountains, of glaciers, blending at times with the clouds,
displaced by the turns of the road, lost apparently, and then returning,
like the shifting scenes of a stage.

Softened by tender thoughts, the hero admired the sweet child before
him, reflecting that glory is only a semi-happiness, that 'tis sad to
grow old all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile
flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon
would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than
that everlasting baobab, _arbos gigantea_, diminutively confined in the
mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful
and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed--but who
knows what the young girls dream of?

VII.

The nights at Tarascon, Where is he? Anxiety. The
grasshoppers on the promenade call for Tartarin. Martyrdom
of a great Tarasconese saint. The Club of the Alpines. What
was happening at the pharmacy. "Help! help! Bezuquet!"

"A letter, Monsieur Bezuquet!.. Comes from Switzerland, _ve!_..
Switzerland!" cried the postman joyously, from the other end of the
little square, waving something in the air, and hurrying along in the
coming darkness.

The apothecary, who took the air, as they say, of an evening before his
door in his shirt-sleeves, gave a jump, seized the letter with feverish
hands and carried it into his lair among the varied odours of elixirs
and dried herbs, but did not open it till the postman had departed,
refreshed by a glass of that delicious _sirop de cadavre_ in recompense
for what he brought.

Fifteen days had Bezuquet expected it, this letter from Switzerland,
fifteen days of agonized watching! And here it was. Merely from l