women even more than of the men. They constantly strike the
foreigner as a stronger expression of the qualities of the race. On the
occasion I speak of the first room in the very humble cabins I
successively visited--in some cases, evidently, it was the only
room--had been set into irreproachable order for the day. It had usually
a sort of brown-toned picturesqueness, begotten of the high
chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the important bed, in its dusky
niche, with its flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware on the
cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet light of
the small, deeply-set window; the mixture, on all things, of smoke-stain
and the polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this "la Rabillon" or
"la Mere Leger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to be seated, and
seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles handsomely and answers
abundantly all questions about her cow, her husband, her bees, her eggs,
and her last-born. The men linger half outside and half in, with their
shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles, with that
simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much more
like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they
receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with
proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them
dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the
_bonhomie_, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their
occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance
which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or
forty thousand francs securely laid by.

And yet, as I say, M. le Cure thinks they are in a bad way, and he knows
something about them. M. le Cure, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there
is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he deprecates an
un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than one cure in
the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I
speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been accused, I
believe, of pretentions to what is called _illuminisme_; but even in his
most illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been
chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet
to say that he is the cure, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy.
I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putti