plate: excited harangues about vintages and grapes, that bristled with facts so esoteric and so solid that my cousin said she would fetch the note-book at once, and slipped away with the graceful bow to the company that we had observed society at Pauillac demanded. I had embarked on the eggs before she came back, and was thinking how I could best express the curious flavour of the grease in which they were cooked, when I heard a slight scuffle at the door, and saw my cousin dart in with inflated eyes of terror, followed by a black boar-hound of about four feet high, on whose back was clinging a monkey of more than usually human and terrifying aspect. The dog approached with a slow politeness, and, as he came, the monkey leaped to and fro from his back to the tables, the chairs, the handle of the door, anything in fact within reach of his chain that presented a surface of a quarter of an inch, with the swinging bound and rebound of a toy on a piece of indiarubber. We cowered behind our table, and the danger was for the time averted by the intervention of some personal friend of the monkey, who, to our unspeakable thankfulness, took him out of the room. But that night, when we had forgotten the incident and were going up the dark staircase to our room, my cousin, who was in the rear, uttered suddenly the most vulgar, kitchenmaid’s shriek I have ever heard, and fled past me in a state bordering on convulsions, with a dark object swinging from the skirt of her dress. It was the monkey. CHAPTER IV.