This good creature took me rambling through the woods, she picking the nuts, and I devouring them; and I found her talk ever sensible and entertaining. Thanks to the natural good manners and intelligence of the French people, there is far less difference than in England between the uneducated and educated classes. My friends of the mill honoured me once with an invitation to dinner. The sky was menacing, and, as I entered the long park avenue whence the mill was visible, I saw the miller and his son anxiously scanning the heavens and the green-roofed aisle of walnut and sycamore by which I came. They hailed me with vigorous welcome, and, as I rested in their beautifully clean kitchen, with broad and generous fireplace, where the wood crackled pleasantly, and shone upon polished brass dogs and gleaming bronze pots, with the high French bed in the deep recess, the miller’s wife mixed me some _cassis_ and water. A more excellent dinner I have never eaten than that cooked, without fuss, or haste, or delay, by the miller’s wife. In a twinkling, as it seemed to me, she had savoury tomato-soup on the table; and while she laid the cloth, the miller sat in front of the capacious mouth of flames, and saw that the browning chicken was kept moist with grease. I told them the story of Alfred and the cakes, and the miller’s wife cried, “She struck a king—a peasant just like myself!” “_Dame_,” laughed the miller, “it doesn’t make much difference, when it is a woman, whether she be queen or peasant!” And I thought the remark one that an English peasant would have been incapable of making. He would have been incapable of such a point of view.