probably been when she was eighty. She sat down on a barrel, and a sketch of her was made as speedily as might be, while the sky faded from gold to red, and the rest of the vintagers slowly tore themselves from the charms of looking over the sketcher’s shoulder to go to the excellent dinner that was waiting for them in a long vine-covered barn. Once more we tasted the vintage soup, and smacked our lips, and said, with facetious under-statement of the case, that it was _pas mal_, and once more we prodded at the cauldron of _ragoût_, and felt the hunger of gluttony rise within us as we smelt its rich and composite fragrance. We were connoisseurs in vintage cookery by this time, and had been shown the mysteries of many vintage kitchens, but as the exhibition always took place a long time after tea and a short time before dinner, it never failed to make us regret that we also were not vintagers. We wandered back to the house through the rose-garden, and though we pretend to no horticultural knowledge, by dint of recognising ‘La France’s’ timid flush, and the orange glow of that poetically-named flower, ‘William Allan Richardson,’ we took a higher place in the estimation of their proprietor, and were encouraged to adventurous remarks on their culture as practised in Ireland, which, we fear, must have hopelessly degraded the gardeners of that country in the eyes of Monsieur A. It was hard to talk of anything else but roses and fruit at dinner, when the centre of the table was a masterpiece of both one and the other; but we were beginning to feel less restricted now in our choice of subjects. During our last flight into polite society our ideas were to us much as the creatures in the Ark must have been to Noah. Our brains were full of interesting things which we wished to plant out on the world, but when we thrust them forth, they could find no rest for the soles of their feet in the strange sea of French conversation, and they returned to sit lamentably upon the shelf, with all the other agreeable but untranslatable notions. Now, however, we had not only enlarged our vocabulary, but we had also lost a good deal of the decent diffidence that had at first prompted us to hold our tongues, and we found ourselves conversing gaily, with a hideous disregard of the trammels of verbs and the pitfalls of gender. I had nearly finished my dinner before I realised that in asking my neighbour to pass _la selle_, I was unreasonably demanding a saddle, and it was almost dreadful that that neighbour gave no sign of what he felt, and merely told me that to eat _du sel_ in such quantities as is my wont was an _habitude Anglaise_. It would have been consolatory to have been laughed at openly on such occasions, but I suppose such altruistic politeness would be beyond the power of most people; certainly no one we ever met soared to such heights, and I am sure we are not capable of it ourselves.