nd daughters were gentleness
itself, and so was his son, and everybody who came into contact with
him. _Si vis pacem, para bellum_, as Pere Brossard used to impress
upon us.

It was the strangest country household I have ever seen, in France
or anywhere else. They were evidently very well off, yet they
preferred to eat their mid-day meal in the kitchen, which was
immense; and so was the mid-day meal--and of a succulency!...

An old wolf-hound always lay by the huge log fire; often with two or
three fidgety cats fighting for the soft places on him and making
him growl; five or six other dogs, non-sporting, were always about
at meal-time.

The servants--three or four peasant women who waited on us--talked
all the time; and were _tutoyees_ by the family. Farm-laborers came
in and discussed agricultural matters, manures, etc., quite
informally, squeezing their bonnets de coton in their hands. The
postman sat by the fire and drank a glass of cider and smoked his
pipe up the chimney while the letters were read--most of them out
loud--and were commented upon by everybody in the most friendly
spirit. All this made the meal last a long time.

M. Laferte always wore his blouse--except in the evening, and then
he wore a brown woollen vareuse, or jersey; unless there were
guests, when he wore his Sunday morning best. He nearly always spoke
like a peasant, although he was really a decently educated man--or
should have been.

His old mother, who was of good family and eighty years of age
lived in a quite humble cottage in a small street in La Tremblaye,
with two little peasant girls to wait on her; and the La Tremblayes,
with whom M. Laferte was not on speaking terms, were always coming
into the village to see her and bring her fruit and flowers and
game. She was a most accomplished old lady, and an excellent
musician, and had known Monsieur de Lafayette.

We breakfasted with her when we alighted from the diligence at six
in the morning; and she took such a fancy to Barty that her own
grandson was almost forgotten. He sang to her, and she sang to him,
and showed him autograph letters of Lafayette, and a lock of her
hair when she was seventeen, and old-fashioned miniatures of her
father and mother, Monsieur and Madame de something I've quite
forgotten.

M. Laferte kept a pack of bassets (a kind of bow-legged beagle), and
went shooting with them every day in the forest, wet or dry;
sometimes we three boys with him. He lent u