Two stone pillars, a small clump of trees, and a railed-in track connecting these, broke at length the blue-green monotony of the vines; and a low gate, with a little black-pinafored girl sitting on it, seemed to suggest a house somewhere near. It also suggested a possibility of repose till such time as the carriage should be repaired, and we stopped the _cocher_ and his flow of conversation to ask if there was a house _là-bas_. Perfectly, there was a house. Did he think its proprietor would permit us to rest there till, etc. etc.? Perfectly, again; in fact, the lady to whom it belonged was yet another of his cousins, a person altogether charming, Madame Suzanne Marcault, and behold one of her children. The little girl was here imported into the conversation, and after some interchange of patois, we found ourselves following the black pinafore up the narrow lane, to demand hospitality from Madame Marcault in the name of M. Joseph Blossier. It had become almost dark, and presently the last of the light was lost under a thick trellis of vines; then our noses were smitten by a smell of almost painful deliciousness, and our small guide, who had demurely stepped along in front of us, suddenly ran round the corner of a wall that half closed the end of the lane, and we heard ourselves announced-- ‘_Maman! V’là deux Anglaises!_’ We followed upon the heels of this introduction, and found ourselves at the wide-open door of a cottage kitchen, wherein a broad-backed peasant woman was stacking logs on a blazing wood fire, and was thereby stimulating a couple of cauldrons to a state of bubbling perfumed ecstasy. This was Madame Suzanne Marcault. We decided afterwards that we had never met any one with quite such good manners as Madame Suzanne. Hers was one of the many _cuisines de vendanges_, and we had stumbled in upon her at the critical moment known to the Irish cook as ‘dishing-in the dinner,’ but not for a second did she let us realise how intensely inconvenient our visit must have been. Her politeness was as sincere as the [Illustration: SUZANNE.] smell of her _potage_, and the fulness of her sympathy as we recounted our adventure was not in the least daunted by the fact that my cousin alternately referred to the wheel as the _boue_ or the _rue_. Her heart was so kind that she felt what we meant. While we were still labouring with our story, wheels were heard on the road, and a whip exploded into a coruscation of crackings at the door. ‘_Ah, Dieu! Les voilà pour le dîner! Dépêche-toi, voyons!_’ A long row of quaint brown and yellow earthen vessels was set out on a table along one wall of the kitchen; there must have been two or three dozen of them, but in a few whirling minutes our hostess and the little girl had not only filled them with the savoury contents of the cauldrons, but had somehow or other stacked them all in the gig that had just driven up to the door.