e thought she was going to kill him; her head reared
itself again and again like a crested snake's, and again and again and
again and again plunged down upon the child, and she kissed his little
body from head to foot with soft violence, and murmured, through her
streaming tears, "My child! my darling! my angel! oh, my poor boy! my
child! my child!"

I will ask my female readers of every degree to tell their brothers and
husbands all the young noble did: how she sat on the floor, and had her
child on her bosom; how she smiled over it through her tears; how she
purred over it; how she, the stately one, lisped and prattled over it;
and how life came pouring into her heart from it.

Before she had had it in her arms five minutes, her pale cheek was as
red as a rose, and her eyes brighter than diamonds.

"Bless you, Rose! bless you! bless you! in one moment you have made me
forget all I ever suffered in my life."

"There is a cold draught," cried she presently, with maternal anxiety;
"close the panel, Rose."

"No, dear; or I could not call to Jacintha, or she to me; but I will
shift the screen round between him and the draught. There, now, come to
his aunt--a darling!"

Then Rose sat on the floor too, and Josephine put her boy on aunt's
lap, and took a distant view of him. But she could not bear so vast a
separation long. She must have him to her bosom again.

Presently my lord, finding himself hugged, opened his eyes, and, as a
natural consequence, his mouth.

"Oh, that will never do," cried Rose, and they put him back in the
cradle with all expedition, and began to rock it. Young master was
not to be altogether appeased even by that. So Rose began singing an
old-fashioned Breton chant or lullaby.

Josephine sang with her, and, singing, watched with a smile her boy drop
off by degrees to sleep under the gentle motion and the lulling song.
They sang and rocked till the lids came creeping down, and hid the
great blue eyes; but still they sang and rocked, lulling the boy, and
gladdening their own hearts; for the quaint old Breton ditty was tunable
as the lark that carols over the green wheat in April; and the words so
simple and motherly, that a nation had taken them to heart. Such songs
bind ages together and make the lofty and the low akin by the great ties
of music and the heart. Many a Breton peasant's bosom in the olden time
had gushed over her sleeping boy as the young dame's of Beaurepaire
gushed now--in thi