half-burnt villages and beleaguered cities. Captain Dupin succeeded, however, in escorting his family safely back into France again, the party halting to recruit awhile under his mother's roof. Nohant, a spot that has become as famous through its associations as Abbotsford, lies about three miles from the little town of La Chatre, in the department of the Indre, part of the old province of Berry. The manor is a plain gray house with steep mansard roofs, of the time of Louis XVI. It stands just apart from the road, shaded by trees, beside a pleasure ground of no vast extent, but with its large flower-garden and little wood allowed to spread at nature's bidding, quite in the English style. Behind the house cluster a score of cottages of the scattered hamlet of Nohant; in the centre rises the smallest of churches, with a tiny cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall of the manor garden. At this country home the tired travellers gladly alighted; but they had barely a few weeks in which to recover from the fatigues of their Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity overwhelmed the household. Maurice Dupin, riding home one night from La Chatre, was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot. The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life opens at once with the death of her father--a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly, actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions irreconcilable. Aurore was not only thrust into an atmosphere of strife, but condemned to the apple of discord. She was to grow up between two hostile camps, each claiming her obedience and affection.