‘_Mais, mangez le donc_,’ responded Suzanne, as she reversed the frying-pan to let the last drops of oil run on to our plates. ‘_C’est biang bong! C’est du cépe--du champignong, vous savez_,’ seeing that we did not seem much enlightened. Here was local colour with a vengeance! There rose before us in a moment the brown, contorted visages of _La Famille Empoisonnée_ among the mummies of St. Michel, and the dusty bits of fungus that they still retained in their jaws. The situation, however, did not admit of retreat. And we attempted none. The mushroom, or fungus, whatever it was, had a dreadful taste, as though rotten leaves and a rusty knife had been fried together in fat. Moreover, it was patent to the meanest intelligence that, whatever its taste might be, no digestion save that of a native or an ostrich could hope to compete with it. We each swallowed two lumps of it whole, and then my cousin looked wanly at me and said, ‘One more, and I shall be sick.’ It was hard and humiliating to explain that we both disliked and feared this crowning treat of a Médoc repast, but we did it; and though we sank in Suzanne’s estimation, it was more in pity than in anger that she removed the horror from before us, and replaced it with a delicious _compôte_ of pears of her own making. We spent an agreeable evening, in conversation so instructive that we fear to reproduce it here, mingled with confidences as to Suzanne’s winter clothes, and criticisms of the sketch I was making of _la petite_. Ten o’clock struck, and Madame Suzanne gave a final tidying-up to her kitchen, and then, opening the great chestnut wood wardrobe that stood near the door, she selected from its layers of coarse brownish linen a pair of sheets, clammy with damp and cleanliness, and led the way once more to our barn. It was a curious feeling when, after we had helped our hostess to make our bed, and said our good-nights, we found ourselves alone in the depths of peasant France without so much as a toothbrush to remind us of our connection with British effeteness, while the huge empty _cuves_ in the barn beneath us roared and sang like organ-pipes in the rising wind. Under ordinary circumstances I do not think we should have survived the dampness of those sheets, but they were not given a fair chance. That night in the Widow Joyce’s cabin in Connemara was recalled to us by many things,--things that, though small in themselves, recurred with a persistence quite disproportioned to their bulk,--and often, while the mosquitoes piped their drinking-songs beneath the canopy, and the fleas came steeplechasing from the boards to the bed, and the candle burnt lower and lower, and the slaughter waxed grimmer and greater, we said to each [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF LA PETITE.] other that the exercise would at least save us from pleurisy or rheumatic fever.