him a great kiss without ceremony. "Dare say you know what that's
for," said she, and went off with a clear conscience and reddish cheeks.

Dard's grandmother had a little house, a little land, a little money,
and a little cow. She could just maintain Dard and herself, and her
resources enabled Dard to do so many little odd jobs for love, yet keep
his main organ tolerably filled.

"Go to bed, my little son, since you have got hashed," said she.--"Bed
be hanged," cried he. "What good is bed? That's a silly old custom wants
doing away with. It weakens you: it turns you into train oil: it is the
doctor's friend, and the sick man's bane. Many a one dies through taking
to bed, that could have kept his life if he had kept his feet like a
man. If I had cut myself in two I would not go to bed,--till I go to the
bed with a spade in it. No! sit up like Julius Caesar; and die as you
lived, in your clothes: don't strip yourself: let the old women strip
you; that is their delight laying out a chap; that is the time they
brighten up, the old sorceresses." He concluded this amiable rhapsody,
the latter part of which was levelled at a lugubrious weakness of his
grandmother's for the superfluous embellishment of the dead, by telling
her it was bad enough to be tied by the foot like an ass, without
settling down on his back like a cast sheep. "Give me the armchair. I'll
sit in it, and, if I have any friends, they will show it now: they will
come and tell me what is going on in the village, for I can't get out to
see it and hear it, they must know that."

Seated in state in his granny's easy-chair, the loss of which after
thirty years' use made her miserable, she couldn't tell why, le Sieur
Dard awaited his friends.

They did not come.

The rain did, and poured all the afternoon. Night succeeded, and
solitude. Dard boiled over with bitterness. "They are a lot of pigs
then, all those fellows I have drunk with at Bigot's and Simmet's. Down
with all fair-weather friends."

The next day the sun shone, the air was clear, and the sky blue. "Ah!
let us see now," cried Dard.

Alas! no fellow-drinkers, no fellow-smokers, came to console their hurt
fellow. And Dard, who had boiled with anger yesterday, was now sad and
despondent. "Down with egotists," he groaned.

About three in the afternoon came a tap at the door.

"Ah! at last," cried Dard: "come in!"

The door was slowly opened, and two lovely faces appeared at the
threshold. The d