must have
noticed a hundred times. Is it your tree or isn't it?"

Eugenie could doubt no longer, and her surprise and delight knew no
bounds. To the Count's family this tree always suggested the story of a
most excellent woman, who lived more than a hundred years before their
day, and who well deserves a word in passing.

The Count's grandfather--a statesman of such repute in Vienna that he
had been honored with the confidence of two successive rulers--was as
happy in his private life as in his public life; for he possessed a most
excellent wife, Renate Leonore. During her repeated visits to France she
came in contact with the brilliant court of Louis XIV., and with the
most distinguished men and women of the day. She sympathized with the
ever-varying intellectual pleasures of the court without sacrificing in
the least her strong, inborn sense of honor and propriety. On this very
account, perhaps, she was the leader of a certain naive opposition, and
her correspondence gives many a hint of the courage and independence
with which she could defend her sound principles and firm opinions, and
could attack her adversary in his weakest spot, all without giving
offense.

Her lively interest in all the personages whom one could meet at the
house of a Ninon, in the centres of cultivation and learning, was
nevertheless so modest and so well controlled that she was honored with
the friendship of one of the noblest women of the time--Mme. de Sevigne.
The Count, after his grandmother's death, had found in an old oaken
chest, full of interesting papers, the most charming letters from the
Marquise and her daughter.

From the hand of Mme. de Sevigne, indeed, she had received, during a
fete at Trianon, the sprig from an orange-tree, which she had planted
and which became in Germany a flourishing tree. For perhaps twenty-five
years it grew under her care, and afterward was treated with the
greatest solicitude by children and grandchildren. Prized for its own
actual worth, it was treasured the more as the living symbol of an age
which, intellectually, was then regarded as little less than divine--an
age in which we, today, can find little that is truly admirable, but
which was preparing the way for events, only a few years distant from
our innocent story, which shook the world.

To the bequest of her excellent ancestor Eugenie showed much devotion,
and her uncle had often said that the tree should some day belong to
her. The greater