The servants and the peasants in the Brittany of those days had a pretty custom of always using the _thou_ when addressing their masters or the Deity, thus inverting the usual association of this mode of address; for to each other they said _you_, and on their lips this was the familiar word, and the _thou_ implied respect. Our servants were of the peasant class, but service altered and civilized them very much, and while no peasant spoke anything but Breton, they talked in an oddly accented French. I remember a pretty example of this in a dear old man who served my little cousin Guénolé du Jacquelot du Bois-Laurel. Guénolé and I, because of some naughtiness, were deprived of strawberries one day at our supper, and the fond old man, grieving over the discomfiture of his little master, said, or, rather chanted, half in condolence, and half in playful consolation: "Oh, le pauvre Guén_o_lé, que tu es dés_o_lé!" accenting the _o_ in a very droll fashion. [Illustration: "A very stately autocratic person"] The servants were all under the orders of a very stately autocratic person, the steward or major-domo. It was he who directed the service from behind his master's chair at the head of the table and he who prescribed the correct costume for the servants. His wife had charge of Jeannie and of me; it was she who, when two little sisters and a brother had been added to the family, took us down to our breakfast and supervised the meal. We had it in a little tower-room on the ground floor, milk soup or gruel and the delicious bread and butter of Brittany. We lunched and dined at ten and five--such were the hours of those days--with our parents in the dining-room, and it was here that one of the most magnificent figures of my childhood appears; for my devoted father brought me back from Paris one day a splendid mechanical pony, life-sized and with a real pony-skin, the apparatus by which he was moved simulating an exhilarating canter. Upon this steed, after dessert, we children mounted one by one, and we resorted to many ruses in order to get the first ride of the day. This dear pony accompanied all my childhood. He lost his hair as the result of an unhappy experiment we tried upon him, scrubbing him with hot water and soap, one day when we were unobserved. He had a melancholy look after that, but was none the less active and none the less loved. When I saw his dismembered body lying in the garret of a grand-niece not many years ago I felt a contraction of the heart. How he brought back my youth, and since that how many generations had ridden him!