The two Mesdemoiselles Deshoulieres, Madeleine and Bribri, were beautiful girls of seventeen or eighteen, brought up in all the innocent pastoralism of their mother. They believed in all the poetical descriptions they read in her eclogues. They expected to see shepherds playing on their pipes, and shepherdesses dancing, and naiads reclining on the shady banks of clear-running rivers. They were delighted to get out of the prosaic atmosphere of Paris, and all the three were overjoyed when they sprang from their carriage, one evening in May, at the chateau of Madame d'Urtis on the banks of the Lignon. Though there were occasional showers at that season, the mornings were splendid; and accordingly the travellers were up almost by daylight, to tread the grass still trembling 'neath the steps of Astrea--to see the fountain, that mirror where the shepherdesses wove wild-flowers into their hair--and to explore the wood, still vocal with the complaints of Celadon. In one of their first excursions, Madeleine Deshoulieres, impatient to see some of the scenes so gracefully described by her mother, asked if they were really not to encounter a single shepherd on the banks of the Lignon? Madame Deshoulieres perceived, at no great distance, a herdsman and cow-girl playing at chuckfarthing; and, after a pause, replied-- "Behold upon the verdant grass so sweet, The shepherdess is at her shepherd's feet! Her arms are bare, her foot is small and white, The very oxen wonder at the sight; Her locks half bound, half floating in the air, And gown as light as those that satyrs wear." While these lines were given in Madame Deshoulieres' inimitable recitative, the party had come close to the rustic pair. "People may well say," muttered Madeleine, "that the pictures of Nature are always best at a distance. Can it be possible that this is a shepherdess--a shepherdess of Lignon?" The shepherdess was in reality a poor little peasant girl, unkempt, unshorn, with hands of prodigious size, a miraculous squint, and a mouth which probably had a beginning, but of which it was impossible to say where it might end. The shepherd was worthy of his companion; and yet there was something in the extravagant stupidity of his fat and florid countenance that was interesting to a Parisian eye. Madame Deshoulieres, who was too much occupied with the verses of the great D'Urfé to attend to what was before her, continued her description-- "The birds all round her praises ever sing, And 'neath her steps the flowers incessant spring." "Your occupation here is delightful, isn't it?" said Madeleine to the peasant girl. "No, 'tain't, miss--that it ain't. I gets nothink for all I does, and when I goes hoam at night I gets a good licking to the bargain." "And you?" enquired Madeleine, turning to the herdsman, who was slinking off.