As she springs into the boat and pulls towards me I note how round and trim she is, and before we have landed at Madame Laguerre's feet I have counted up Lucette's birthdays,--those that I know myself,--and find to my surprise that she must be eighteen. We have always been the best of friends, Lucette and I, ever since she looked over my shoulder years ago and watched me dot in the outlines of her boat, with her dog Mustif sitting demurely in the bow. Madame, her mother, begins again:-- "Do you know that it is Saturday that you come again to bother? Now it will be a _filet_, of course, with mushrooms and tomato salad; and there are no mushrooms, and no tomatoes, and nothing. You are horrible. Then, when I get it ready, you say you will come at three. 'Yes, madame; at three,'--mimicking me,--'sure, very sure.' But it is four, five, o'clock--and then everything is burned up waiting. Ah! I know you." This goes on always, and has for years. Presently she softens, for she is the most tender-hearted of women, and would do anything in the world to please me. "But, then, you will be tired, and of course you must have something. I remember now there is a chicken. How will the chicken do? Oh, the chicken it is lovely, _charmant_. And some pease--fresh. Monsieur picked them himself this morning. And some Roquefort, with an olive. Ah! You leave it to me; but at three--no later--not one minute. _Sacré! Vous êtes le diable!_" As we walk under the arbor and by the great trees, towards the cottage, Lucette following with the oars, I inquire after monsieur, and find that he is in the city, and very well and very busy, and will return at sundown. He has a shop of his own in the upper part where he makes _passe-partouts_. Here, at his home, madame maintains a simple restaurant for tramps like me. These delightful people are old friends of mine, François Laguerre and his wife and their only child Lucette. They have lived here for nearly a quarter of a century. He is a straight, silver-haired old Frenchman of sixty, who left Paris, between two suns, nearly forty years ago, with a gendarme close at his heels, a red cockade under his coat, and an intense hatred in his heart for that "little nobody," Napoleon III. If you met him on the boulevard you would look for the decoration on his lapel, remarking to yourself, "Some retired officer on half pay." If you met him at the railway station opposite, you would say, "A French professor returning to his school." Both of these surmises are partly wrong, and both partly right. Monsieur Laguerre has had a history. One can see by the deep lines in his forehead and by the firm set of his eyes and mouth that it has been an eventful one.