There was more, much more, to be seen in St. Emilion, and we saw some of it. We trust it may yet be given to us to stay for a clear three days at the hotel of the Russian princess, and to dawdle in a trance of idleness up and down the little streets, unharassed by time, or letter-writing, or newspapers. As it was, we went slowly and gradually round the beautiful ruins of a monastery in the upper part of the town, where the beeches and ashes grew freely in the nave and side aisles, and spread what shelter they could over the defenceless shafts and columns. The remembrance of those still cloisters, with their leafy sunlight flickering year after year on the worn flags and the gentle invasions of the grass, is pleasant in the mind--a possession chief among many gains of that very white day at St. Emilion. The bell-foundry working leisurely in the blackened shell of what had been another monastery was an episode in perfect keeping with the general religious calm of the town; so was the Pilgrim’s-Progress kind of landscape that we viewed from a corner of the fortifications--a delectable land, lying wide and rich in the hot afternoon haze. Indeed, had it not been that in a quiet back street we came upon a group of old women who sat knitting at their vine-hung doors, and discussed with shrill and personal directness the intentions of one of the party with regard to her will, we might have thought it was ‘within in in heaven we were,’ as an Irishman said, with an intensifying wealth of prepositions, in describing a whisky tent. CHAPTER X. [Illustration] It happened to one of us--no matter which--in early youth to have a governess who hailed from the parts about Bordeaux. She was a small rigid lady, with a cast-iron black silk skirt, and an environing squint that extended her jurisdiction round illimitable corners, and up and down stairs at the same time. So, at least, her pupils felt, as they trembled in the glare of that erratic green-brown eye, and quavered the regulation early French to one another, even in the fastnesses of their own rooms. Mademoiselle still holds sway among certain outlying members of our family, and on the eve of our departure for France there came a note in the well-known hand, suggestive of nothing so much as a paper of pins, in which she begged us, if our travels took us near St. B., to present the enclosed introduction at the country-house of Monsieur de Q., whose little daughters had been among ‘_les plus gentilles de ses élèves_.’