By the time I get back I am ready for breakfast. You know I never could eat or drink early in the morning. I have my coffee in the orchard under a big pear tree, and I have the inevitable book propped against the urn. Needless to say I never read a word. I simply look at the panorama. All the same I have to have the book there or I could not eat, just as I can't go to sleep without books on the bed. After breakfast I write letters. Before I know it Amelie appears at the library door to announce that "Madame est servie"--and the morning is gone. As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-room. It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in the house at noon. Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain. In the afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light supper in the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson rambler, one of the first ever planted here over thirty years ago. I must tell you about that crimson rambler. You know when I hired this house it was only a peasant's hut. In front of what is now the kitchen--it was then a dark hole for fuel--stood four dilapidated posts, moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of something. It was what I called a "mess." I was not as educated as I am now. I saw--it was winter--what looked to me an unsightly tangle of disorder. I ordered those posts down. My workmen, who stood in some awe of me,--I was the first American they had ever seen,--were slow in obeying. They did not dispute the order, only they did not execute it. One day I was very stern. I said to my head mason, "I have ordered that thing removed half a dozen times. Be so good as to have those posts taken down before I come out again." He touched his cap, and said, "Very well, madame." It happened that the next time I came out the weather had become spring-like. The posts were down. The tangle that had grown over them was trailing on the ground--but it had begun to put out leaves. I looked at it--and for the first time it occurred to me to say, "What is that?" The mason looked at me a moment, and replied, "That, madame! That is a 'creamson ramblaire'--the oldest one in the commune." Poor fellow, it had never occurred to him that I did not know. Seven feet to the north of the climbing rose bush was a wide hedge of tall lilac bushes. So I threw up an arbor between them, and the crimson rambler now mounts eight feet in the air. It is a glory of color to-day, and my pride. But didn't I come near to losing it?