The same admiration I am compelled to entertain for the French peasant, I feel for the French artisan, whether in town or country. Yet he, too, has been depicted as a creature of loathsome perversity; but I can only speak of him as I have found him. Some years ago, going from Cognac to Angoulême, I decided to abandon the dull, incommunicative travellers of the second class and try my chances among the loquacious third-class voyagers. Here I fell into the very midst of good-humoured, general conversation, and learnt more about the stirring local events of Cognac and Angoulême than I should have known after a week’s residence in either town. A young girl with a round, baby face addressed me in excellent English, so evidently beaming with the joy of being able to do so that I lavished my congratulations instantly, and learnt that she had been for two years a nurse in Warwickshire, where she had picked up fluent English and met with so much kindness and innocent pleasures of all sorts that she adored the name of England ever afterwards. Certainly not a sister of M. Mirbeau’s ineffable Mlle. Celestine, this dear, sentimental little maid of Angoulême. It was a case of attraction at first sight, for she begged of me to use her room instead of going to a hotel, and be her guest at her father’s, a little watchmaker, during the three days I projected staying at Angoulême. I accepted, enchanted at a proposal that offered me such an out-of-the-way and original glimpse of a French town. “Sweetness and light” are words that best describe this delicious little creature. She was like a round, innocent kitten, all gaiety and brightness, and sparkled and danced along the streets beside me, crazy with the delight of talking English again. Girls, she moaned dejectedly, were most unhappy creatures in France; they had no pleasures, no freedom. She could not take her beautiful big dog Tom, given her as a puppy in Warwickshire, out for a walk because it is not proper in France for a young girl to be seen out-of-doors with a dog. Poor little martyr, she did not look much of a victim, and missing and yearning for the larger ways of England had not thinned or paled her rosy, vivacious, round visage. Here she was, as happy as a queen because she was going to sleep on her grandmother’s sofa that a stranger from whom she would take no money might sleep comfortably in her bed. She insisted on carrying my bag, too, as if that were another beaming source of satisfaction; and as we trudged blithely up from the valley of the station to the quaint street in which a quaint, dim-eyed old man lived and made and mended watches in an altitude rivalling the stars, I saw that Jeanne was a popular personage. Not this the timid French girl who slips in and out of life unnoticed, and says, _Oui, monsieur; Non, monsieur_, to the trousered wolves. The station-master cast her a cordial nod; the doctor, climbing into his gig, heard her speak English, and