Another disappointment was the peasant straw hat upon which she had set her heart, such a hat as I had bought in Brittany--conical, broad-brimmed, many-coloured. We shouldered round the sunny, noisy square, finding everything imaginable for sale except straw hats; finally we left the open-air merchants, and in a bonnet shop, whose only claim to romance was its position in the arcades that--like the ‘Rows’ at Chester--surrounded the square, she bought for twenty sous a hat that might easily have been worn in Bond Street. We were to be shown St. Emilion this delicious mid-June day,--by the calendar it was about the [Illustration: MY COUSIN RAN ABOUT FEVERISHLY, SNAPPING OFF KODAK PLATES IN THE MOST EXTRAVAGANT WAY.] 8th or 9th of October, but it was evident that there was a mistake somewhere,--and the drive to that small but remarkable town was one of most brilliant and fragrant pleasantness. We were mounting up out of the levels about Libourne, rising higher and higher into the bright morning, till we could see some of the silver coils of the Dordogne beginning to reveal themselves, and red-roofed villages broke through the vines on the slopes below us, giving unexpected suggestions of Arcadia. Presently above the coachman’s hat a yellow crocketed spire thrust itself into the blue of the sky; there came crowding after it towers and roofs, and finally a tall crumbling wall, standing quite alone outside old fortifications, with nothing but the Gothic window-openings left to show that it had once been part of a great church. We drove in through a towered gateway, and over the cobble-stones dear to the writers of mediæval romance and the makers of carriage springs, and, squeezing our way along a street narrow enough to allow us to shake hands simultaneously with the occupants of the houses on both sides, we pulled up at the opening of a street too steep for a carriage. Down this we went on foot, reminded a good deal of Clovelly, and yet glad that it was not Clovelly, but a walled town in the heart of the vineyard country, with a saint and a shrine, and a history as gorgeous as an illuminated missal. Level ground was granted at last to our aching knees, a little plateau where was a shading chestnut tree, a railing, and behind these the unassuming front of an inn,--the Hôtel Dussaut, if our memories are correct,--with its doors opening straight in upon a room where a cleanly-laid table glimmered in the cool obscurity. As we stood under the chestnut tree a sound as of the beating of eggs rose to us presently from a flagged yard about fifteen feet below our plateau, and, looking over the edge, we had an excellent bird’s-eye view of two young ladies engaged respectively in beating a yellow compound with a fork, and in shaking some other yellow compound in a frying-pan over a charcoal fire. One of them wore _pince-nez_, both had early Florentine shocks of hair, and a general appearance [Illustration: THE ÆSTHETIC DAUGHTER OF THE HOTEL.]