Now he advanced with a certain feeling of enforced intemperance upon a prospect of superabundant beauty. The great noontide heat was become a salt memory, to be tasted only for emphasis of the bouquet of that velvety wine of air that poured from the heights. Distant hills ran along an amber sky, like the shadows of nearer ones. Far away a jagged keep surmounting a crag stood out, deep umber, from a basin in the valley brimming with blue mist. Closer at hand a marrowy white stream, sliding noiseless over the crest of a slope silhouetted against the northern vaults, seemed the very running band drawn from the heavens to keep the earth spinning. The grasshopper shrilled in the roadside tangle; comfortable doves, drowsing amongst the chestnut leaves, exchanged sleepy confidences. Sometimes the clap of a cow-bell, sometimes the hollow call of a herdsman, thrilled the prosperous calms of light as a dropped stone scatters a water image. These were the acuter accents on a tranquillity that no thought could wound. At last, when the sun flamed upon the horizon like a burning house of the Zodiac, the traveller came through a deep wood-path upon the village he sought, and was glad to see dusk mantling its gables and blotting out the red lights of the open valley in which it lay. If Madame van Roon, keeper of the hostel Landlust, cut her coat according to her cloth, she should have been in affluent circumstances. Daniel Lambert might have furnished her his vest, a couple of dragoons their cloaks for skirt. This, proceeding from a mighty roll of padding--a veritable stuffed bolster--that circled her unnamable waist, swayed in one piece, like a diving-bell in a current, with her every movement. Her stays, hooped with steel after the Dutch mode, would have hung slack on a kilderkin. The lobes of her fat ears stretched under the weight of a pair of positive little censers. But the finished pride of her was her cap, a wonder of stiff goffering, against the erect border of which her red face lay like a ham on a dish-paper. With so full a presence, she had only to stand in a doorway, if inclined to argument, and not so much as a minor postulate could evade her. “_Qu’est-ce que c’est doncg cette manière de moogsieur là_!” she gasped at our gentleman with a choking shrillness. “_Mais où est vôgtre valetaille, vôgtre équipage_?” She quarrelled gutturally, like an envious stepmother, with the speech of her adoption. “I am in my own service, madame,” said Ned, in no small wonder; “and that is to own the best master a man can have.” She slapped the three-partitioned money-pouch that hung at her middle. “Oo, ay,” she gurgled truculently; “and a fine master of economy, I’ll be bound.” Ned, for short argument, fished out a palmful of pieces. She admitted him grudgingly even then; but the young man was completely satisfied. “This is excellent tonic,” he thought, “after an enervating experience. In Méricourt, it seems, there is food for study.”