The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk--a gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white--a scent of sandalwood--a rustle that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet, that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions. On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of the way home (to please her mother)--a frail burden, with her poor, long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my ear--she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name was Peter). She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom, and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the Erl-king--"mais comme ils sont la tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien a craindre." And Mimsey was _si bonne camarade_, in spite of her solemnity and poor health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of her eternal gravity--for she was a real tomboy at heart--that I soon carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and would have done anything for her. As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun. "Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand ca ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mere ... elle a toutes les intelligences de la tete et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased Heaven that he should be her grandfather--on the maternal side. _L'art d'etre grandpere!_ This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of his own. He was a _born_ grandfather! Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common--music, for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil, which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.