my meaning—at improving, or at seeing to the
current necessary labour of his estate, much as
Australian settlers are obliged to look after
their newly-acquired sheep-farms. By daylight
every morning he had taken his cup of café
au lait, and was off, either on foot or on horse-
back, according to the distance, to see how
some planting, or draining, or ploughing, or
reaping, or felling of trees, was going on. At
eleven o'clock he came back, and we then met
for the first time in the day, at a déjeûner à la
fourchette, which lasted until noon. No sooner
was this meal over than he was off again to
superintend some other work, while the lady
of the house—who was always invisible until
eleven o'clock—disappeared again to her house-
hold duties, and was no more seen until six, at
which time we all sat down to dinner. In the
evening, the master of the house was invariably
knocked-up and sleepy, and his wife was fully
occupied with hearing their two children say
their prayers, and seeing them to bed. By
nine o'clock everybody in the house had
retired for the night. This was the life we led
six days out of seven. On Sunday the whole
family went early to hear mass at the church
of the neighbouring village. It was a league
off, and they only got back a little before noon,
when the substantial breakfast was served.
The afternoon was spent in smoking, inspecting
the poultry-yard, and receiving the visits
of the parish priest, or a few of the peasant
farmers who lived in the vicinity. There were
no books, music, visitors to my hosts of their
own rank in life; there was no returning of visits,
no hunting, very little shooting, and, in short,
no amusement of any kind.

Such as the very little shooting was, it
formed for a time my solitary resource. After
shooting in Indian jheels, where a bag of fifteen
or sixteen couple of snipe is by no means an
unusual amount of sport before mid-day, it was
poor work to toil from early morning to late
in the afternoon, and be rewarded with, perhaps,
two dozen shots, of which more than half
were at birds so wild that it was a mere waste
of powder and lead firing at them. Then,
again, French pointers are not trained as ours
are to drop after a shot, but are taught to run
in upon dead or wounded game, to pick it up, or
catch it, and bring it to the sportsman. This
custom an Englishman can hardly ever get
over, and it worries him, no matter how long
he may shoot in France. To bring back to
the château half a dozen—three brace—red-
legged partridges was considered a very excellent
day's sport for my single gun, and to do
even this I had to start very early in the morning,
remain out all day, and only get home towards
evening. When my bag contained a hare
—le beau lièvre, as the French always call that
quadruped—there was as much excitement
among the servants and farm-labourers, as I
ever saw in an Indian village when a Bengal
tiger had fallen at a shot from an English
sahib's rifle. The French look less to sport, but
more to the shooting for the pot, than we do. I
remember on one occasion bringing home, as
the fruit of twelve hours' toiling under a blazing
September sun, four brace of partridges, three
snipe, and two hares. This wonderful day's
sport was talked about through all the district
for upwards of a month.

I very soon began to tire of this kind of
shooting. I found the severe toil of walking
over such a great extent of country—which
was absolutely necessary in order to make any
bag at all—too trying for my state of health,
and therefore took to merely wandering about
gun in hand, shooting if I fell in with any
game, but not ashamed to return home with an
empty bag. I became a subscriber for six
months to that best of all papers—some one has
called it the best friend of Englishmen on the
Continent—Galignani's Messenger, and the
walking over to the district post-office—two
leagues off—three times a week, in order to
receive each time two numbers of the paper,
became almost occupation enough for me. In
the country districts of France there is no such
thing as delivery by the postman, each person
living more than about a mile—I forget how
many kilomètres is the stipulated distance—from
the post-office in the provinces, must go or send
for his own letters or papers, or do without
them.

On one of these walking expeditions to fetch
my newspaper I first became acquainted with
Monsieur Flammand, or Père Flammand, as he
was generally called. I was caught in a severe
thunder-storm close to the outskirts of the village,
and I ran to the nearest habitation and asked
for shelter until the storm should pass. The
house was a small two or three roomed cottage,
of the sort inhabited in that part of France by
the small peasant proprietors. It stood quite by
itself, in a small plot of ground, perhaps three
hundred yards from the rest of the village. The
only occupants of the cottage appeared to be an
old peasant woman and a very much older man,
who was dressed in the long cassock worn on
all occasions by the French Catholic clergy
when not officiating in church. The old
gentleman received me very kindly, and begged I
would remain until the storm had quite passed,
but as the rain lasted more than an hour, I
remained talking with him long enough to discover
that he was a man of much greater refinement
and knowledge than was generally found
among the rural clergy of France. That he
was a priest I understood from the theological
and devotional books in his room, but having
already made the acquaintance of the parish
priest at my cousin's house, and not having
heard of there being another clergyman in the
neighbourhood, I was puzzled to know who my
entertainer could be, knowing that in France
priests without parishes are very rare indeed,
there being often not enough in the various
dioceses to allow of an incumbent to each parish.
Although an old man, my host was evidently
not too infirm to officiate in a church, and therefore
I dismissed the idea that he had been
shelved on account of his age. When I returned