trembling like a butterfly afraid to alight; oh, a very charming and lovely creature--an astonishing creature, really, to be the daughter of such a man. Before the visit was over I had determined to make her my prima donna: she should lead the procession, and open the dance with some gallant of her choice--a promise received with delight by the family; the girl being particularly pleased, especially with the last part of it, and so I left them, and kept on my rounds through the village and outlying district. "It was a lovely summer day--in June, if I remember--too late for May-poles, but I didn't care--and long before the hour arrived our lawn was thronged with peasants and their sons and daughters, and our stables and paddocks crowded with their carts and vehicles. My father had provided a tent where the young people should change their clothes, but I took my little maid up into my own room, and my femme de chambre and I dressed her at our leisure. "It is astonishing what you find underneath the rough garments worn by some of our peasants. I have often heard one of my friends--a figure painter--express the same surprise over his models. What appears in coarse cloth to be an ill-shaped arm turns out to be beautifully modelled when bared to the overhead light of a studio. So it was with this girl. She had the dearest, trimmest little figure, her shoulders temptingly dimpled, her throat and neck with that exquisite modelling only seen in a beautifully formed girl just bursting into womanhood. And then, too, her hair--what a lot of it there was when it was all combed out, and of so rich a brown, with a thread of gold here and there where the light struck it; and, more than all, her deep sapphire-blue eyes. Oh!--you cannot think how lovely they were; eyes that drank you all in until you were lost in their depths--like a well holding and refreshing you. "So we dressed her up--leghorn hat, petticoats, tiny slippers on her tiny feet--and they were tiny--even to her shepherdess crook--until she looked as if she had just stepped out of one of Watteau's canvases. "And you may be sure she had her innings! The young fellows went wild over her, as well as the older ones--and even some of our own gentry tried to make love to her--so I heard next day. When all was ready she picked out her own partner, as I had promised she should, a straight, well-built, honest-faced young peasant whom she called 'Henri'--a year or two her senior, and whom I learned was the son of a poor farmer whose land adjoined her father's, but whose flocks and herds consisted of but one cow and a few pigs. In his pearl-gray short clothes and jacket, slashed sleeves, and low-cut shoes he looked amazingly well, and I did not blame her for her choice. Indeed she could not have done better, perfectly matched as they were in their borrowed plumes.