"The next morning I remembered her permission and my promise, and I rode out through the town again, up the mountain-road, to the Nid de l'Aigle; glad of anything that gave me an amusement and a pursuit. I never wholly appreciate the far niente, I think; perhaps I have lived too entirely in the world--and a world ultra-cold and courtly, too--to retain much patience for the meditative life, the life of trees and woods, sermons in stones, and monologues in mountains. I am a restless, ambitious man; I must have a _pursuit_, be it of a great aim or a small, or I grow weary, and my time hangs heavily on hand. Already having found Florelle de l'Heris among these hills reconciled me more to my _pro tempo_ banishment from society, excitement, and pleasure, and I thanked my good fortune for having lighted upon her. She was very lovely, and I always care more for the physical than the intellectual charms of any woman. I do not share some men's visionary requirements on their mental score; I ask but material beauty, and am content with it. "I rode up to the Nid de l'Aigle: by a clearer light it stood on a spot of great picturesqueness, and before the fury of the revolutionary peasantry had destroyed what was the then habitable and stately château, must have been a place of considerable extent and beauty, and in the feudal times, fenced in by the natural ramparts of its shelving rocks, no doubt all but impregnable. There were but a few ruins now that held together and had a roof over them--the part where Madame Cazot and the last of the De l'Heris lived; it was perfectly solitary; there was nothing to be heard round it but the foaming of the river, the music of the sheep-bells from the flocks that fed in the clefts and on the slopes of grass-land, and the shout of some shepherd-boy from the path below; but it was as beautiful a spot as any in the Pyrenees, with its overhanging beech-woods, its wilderness of wild-flowers, its rocks covered with that soft gray moss whose tint defies one to repeat it in oil or water colors, and its larches and beeches drooping over into the waters of the Gave. In such a home, with no companions save her father, old Cazot, and her great stag-hound, and, occasionally, the quiet recluses of St. Marie Purificatrice, with everything to feed her native poetry and susceptibility, and nothing to teach her anything of the actual and ordinary world, it were inevitable that the character of Florelle should take its coloring from the scenes around her, and that she should grow up singularly childlike, imaginative, and innocent of all that in any other life she would unavoidably have known. Well educated she was, through her father and the nuns, but it was a semi-religious and peculiar education, of which the chief literature had been the legendary and sacred poetry of France and Spain, the chief amusement copying the illuminated missals lent her by the nuns, or joining in the choral services of the convent; an education that taught