which are regarded as specifically manly, was a good-looking and agreeable fellow enough. As for Leopold, with his experience of Courts, and his kind and considerate disposition, he could not very well prove otherwise than a pleasant companion and a kind patron. We have plenty of portraits of him left, limned both with pen and with brush. Short and stumpy, round-bellied, red-faced, with a free allowance of pimples, and, moreover, with those abnormally stout legs which remained his most striking outward characteristic to his dying day, he must have looked a veritable _Jacques Bonhomme_ put into a full-bottomed wig and court-dress. There is a tale to those legs. Leopold came into the world about two months before his time, _very_ sickly and _very_ delicate. More particularly his legs were very spindles. Under a special treatment designed to remedy this defect, they grew just as much too big as previously they had been too thin. Terrible stickler for etiquette that Leopold was, and intent upon lavish display, when occasion seemed to demand it, both himself and his wife were simplicity itself when such occasion was withdrawn. They could talk to a peasant in the peasant's brogue about his _ouïettes_ and his hemp. One of the princesses thought nothing of accepting a lift home in a market-cart, and, as the driver commendingly related, showed herself "_bien sage_." "_Cousine_," said the Duchess to the Duchess of Elboeuf, "_restez chez nous, nous avons un bon gigot_." This simplicity and familiarity with humble ways as a matter of course made the Duke and Duchess popular. But what helped them more than anything to gain their people's hearts was their remarkable readiness to enter into all those local _fêtes_ which long custom had sanctioned as common to both high and low. The French occupation had made a long break in the observance of those _fêtes_. How should the Lorrains "sing songs" in what had become to them practically "a strange land?" For something like thirty years their harps remained hung up upon the willow-trees. Great, however, was the joy when at the first _Fête de la Veille des Rois_--kept in commemoration of the brilliant victory achieved over Charles the Bold in 1476--and at the _Brandons_ or _Faschinottes_,[3] following that _fête_, the Duke and Duchess appeared in person among the merry-makers, entering most good-humouredly and, indeed, jovially into all their doings. Of the many local customs which Lorraine boasts, the _Brandons_ was at that time still the particular favourite. It had been handed down from hoary antiquity. Every couple married since the last _Brandons_ was expected to join. The husband had to provide himself with a faggot or log of wood, and carry it in procession through the town, accompanied by his wife, along a roundabout route prescribed by custom, to the Duke's palace, march three times past the Duke's window, and then deposit the piece of fuel on a huge pyramidal pyre built up in the ducal courtyard.