We sat hungrily in a corner of the kitchen while the little girl spread a surprisingly clean cloth on the table, and Madame Suzanne stirred the _ragoût_, and delicately added to it some further finishings which we trusted were not garlic. The yellowish walls and the smoke-stained wooden ceiling took the firelight with warm good fellowship; the blue china-tiled stove, hard-working _aide-de-camp_ to the big open fireplace, sent an upward glow from its red charcoal upon the glittering array of pots and pans and glazed earthen vessels upon the wall above it; and round the open door the vine leaves and bunches of grapes were emphasised theatrically by the firelight, and the last light of the evening and the whirring of the _cigales_ came strangely through them from without. The master of the house was late, and feeling, no doubt, like other hostesses, that the interval before dinner required alleviation, Madame Suzanne offered to show us over the rest of her house. She began paradoxically by leading us out of it, and then took her way round the corner of the house under the grape trellis. She stopped at what was apparently a coach-house door, and after some difference of opinion between a large key and its keyhole, pushed it open. A blast of cold air nearly extinguished the flame of the little chimneyless lamp that she carried, as we followed her into a lofty barn, with giant barrels looming round its walls, and permeated with the sour, unforgetable, indescribable smell of a Médoc _cuvier_. This place was about forty feet long, and at the end of it we dimly descried a ladder, with a hand-rail, mounting to a door high up in the wall. Towards this we incredulously followed our hostess, and having stumbled up it after her, found ourselves in a musty loft; and then, saying something, whose import we did not quite catch, about her eldest daughter, Suzanne unlocked another door, and told us that this was where we were to sleep. Our courage receded to the toes of our boots; were we to share the room with that eldest daughter, or could it be that we were to join in an even more general family party? It was a long bare room, with nothing in it except a very large bed, swathed and canopied all over with heavy brown draperies, a chair, and a small table in the middle of the room, on which was a toy piano, a manual of devotion, and a little mirror made of something resembling tinfoil. ‘It seems we need not have sent for our washing-gear,’ observed my cousin. ‘I wish we were well out of this.’ ‘It is a pretty bed, _hein_?’ said the amiable Suzanne, thumping the awful brown swaddlings of our couch. ‘And you need fear nothing; my husband and I and _la petite_ sleep in there.’ She pointed to another door. ‘If you are ill, anything, you have but to knock’-- ‘And mademoiselle, _votre fille aînée?_’ we faltered.