It was pleasant to hear the _clap-clap-clap_ on a hot summer day. Is it known that the pretty pied water-wagtail is called _la lavandière_ from its love of water and its manner of beating up and down its tail as our washerwomen wield their wooden beaters? Beyond the river were the woods where I often rode with my father, and beyond the woods distant ranges of mountains. I looked out at all this from my nursery-windows, with their frame of climbing-roses and heliotrope. Near my window was a great lime-tree of the variety known as American. The vanilla-like scent of its flowers was almost overpowering, and all this fragrance gave my mother a headache, and she had to have her room moved away from the garden to another part of the house. How clearly I see this room of my mother's, with its high, canopied four-poster bed and the pale-gray paper on the walls covered with yellow fleurs-de-lis! The wall-paper in my father's room was one of the prettiest I have ever seen, black, all bespangled with bright butterflies. Of the _grand salon_ I remember most clearly the high marble mantelpiece, upheld by hounds sitting on their haunches. On this mantelpiece was a huge _boule_ clock, two tall candelabra of Venetian glass, and two figures in _vieux Saxe_ of a marquis and a marquise that filled us with delight. On each side of the fireplace were two Louis XV court chairs--chairs, that is, with only one arm, to admit of the display of the great hoop-skirts of the period. I remember, too, our special delight in the foot-stools, which were of mahogany, shaped rather like gondolas and cushioned in velvet; for we could sit inside them and make them rock up and down. The houses of the _noblesse_ swarmed with servants; many of them were married, and their children, and even their grandchildren, lived on with our family in patriarchal fashion. Men and maids all wore the costumes of their respective Breton cantons, exceedingly beautiful some of them, stiff with heavy embroideries, the strange caps of the women fluted and ruffled, adorned with lace, rising high above their heads and falling in long lappets upon their shoulders, or perched on their heads like butterflies. These caps were decorated with large gold pins and dangling golden pendants, and these and the materials for the costumes were handed down in the peasants' families from generation to generation. My young nurse Jeannie--there was an old nurse called Gertrude--wore a skirt of bright-blue woolen stuff and a black-cloth bodice opening in a square over a net fichu thickly embroidered with _paillettes_ of every color. Hers was the small flat cap of Quimper, with the odd foolscap excrescence, rather like the horn of a rhinoceros, curving forward over the forehead. Needless to say, the servants did not do their daily work in this fine array; while that went on they were enveloped from head to foot in large aprons.