“No! What an idea--and what intolerable conceit! She is my housekeeper, and remembered your drawling voice from overhearing it a moment that night four or five years ago in my house; so she knew where to send the police if you didn’t bring the coat back!” After all those years I was sitting here, now, at midnight in the peasant hotel, in my night clothes, and honoring womankind in my thoughts; for here was another woman, with the noble and delicate intuitions of her sex, trusting me, a total stranger, with all her modest wealth. She entered the room, just then, and stood beaming upon me a moment with her sweet matronly eyes--then took away the jewelry. _Tuesday, September 22d._--Breakfast in open air. Extra canvas was now to be added to the boat’s hood to keep the passengers and valises better protected during rainstorms. I passed through the villagette and started to walk over the wooded hill, the boat to find us on the river bank somewhere below, by and by. I soon got lost among the high bushes and turnip gardens. Plenty of paths, but none went to river. Reflection. Decision--that the path most traveled was the one leading in the right direction. It was a poor conclusion. I got lost again; this time worse than before. But a peasant of above eighty (as she said, and certainly she was very old and wrinkled and gray and bent) found me presently and undertook to guide me safely. She was vigorous, physically, prompt and decided of movement, and altogether soldierlike; and she had a hawk’s eye and beak, and a gypsy’s complexion. She said that from her girlhood up to not so very many years ago she had done a man’s work on a woman’s pay on the big keel boats that carry stone down the river, and was as good a man as the best, in the matter of handling stone. Said she had seen the great Napoleon when she was a little child. Her face was so wrinkled and dark and so eaglelike that she reminded me of old Indians one sees out on the Great Plains--the outside signs of age, but in the eye an indestructible spirit. She had a couple of laden baskets with her which I had found heavy after three minutes’ carrying, when she was finding the way for me, but they seemed nothing to her. She impressed one rather as a man than as a woman; and so, when she spoke of her child that was drowned, and her voice broke a little and her lip quivered, it surprised me; I was not expecting it. “Grandchild?” No--it was her own child. “Indeed? When?” So then it came out that it was sixty years ago. It seemed strange that she should mind it so long. But that was the woman of it, no doubt. She had a fragment of newspaper--religious--with rude holy woodcuts in it and doubtful episodes in the lives of mediæval saints and anchorites--and she could read these instructive matters in fine print without glasses; also, her eyes were as good at long distances. She led hither and thither among the paths and finally brought me out overlooking the river. There was a steep sandy frontage