After leaving little Louis, Amy pedalled along leisurely. At first she passed only one or two houses, but each of them offered her something to think of. In front of one, two or three barefooted children were playing hop-scotch, with the limits marked out in lines drawn by a stick on the dusty road. "I should think they'd stub their toes," she thought, as she watched them, "but they're so well-dressed, except their feet, that I suppose they prefer to go without shoes." In the doorway of a second cottage, set like the other, close to the road, a mother was standing with a baby in her arms, and a tiny little girl clinging to her skirts. These children, like all the others she had seen, had the brightest of black eyes. Beside the door was a well, boarded in, with a bucket beside it. The woman looked so friendly that Amy stopped for a drink of water, and, making use of her best French, she spent a few minutes talking with the woman. A fine team of oxen hauling an empty hay wagon, beside which walked a strapping youth in blue jeans and a flapping straw hat, was the next reminder to Amy that she was indeed in a foreign country. After she had returned the cheerful _bonjour_ of two or three bareheaded women whom she met trudging along toward a hayfield, Amy was recalled to herself. Her mother and the others were out of sight. "The driver will think that I am not even following;" and making good speed up a long, gradual hill, she saw the carriage waiting for her some distance ahead. "This way, this way," shouted Martine. The driver waved his whip toward the left, and when Amy caught up, they had changed their direction, and she could feel the soft fresh breeze blowing in from St. Mary's Bay. "Did you ever see such a clear blue sky?" "Oh, yes, Martine,"--Amy was thinking of cloudless days on the North Shore,--"but none bluer, perhaps." "But it seems so foreign," interposed Priscilla, in a tone that expressed some disapproval of foreign things. "I'm not sure that I like it." "It seems different from other places, though I can't tell why." "This child is part of the why. Just look at him." Martine pointed to a little boy of about eight, dressed in black, with deep embroidered ruffles of white falling about his wrists, and a broad ruffled collar on his coat. He wore a hat that was something like a tam-o'-shanter, and something like a mortar-board, and he carried a large slate under his arm. "He's evidently on his way home from school. See the crowd of children behind him."