Janetoun and one of her sisters-in-law were the only members of our party who had a hatchet to bury; and the burial was over so quickly--being but an extra hug and an explosion of kisses--that I should have known nothing about it but for the over-long tongue of Mise Fougueiroun: who, in a kindly way, is as thorough-going a gossip as ever lived. Of all things in the world to quarrel about, this quarrel had grown out of a spirited difference of opinion as to how the heel of a knitted stocking should be turned! But the matter had come to be quite of a seriousness, and all the family breathed freer when those resounding peace-kisses were given and received. Actually, as I happened to learn later, the reconciliation was pushed to such an extreme that each of them incontinently adopted the other's knitting creed--with the curious result that they now are in a fair way to have a fresh quarrel for next Christmas out of the same matter on inverted lines! It was before the lighting of the yule-log that the feud of the stocking heels thus happily (even though only temporarily) was pacified, and the family festival was cloudless from first to last. When the serious part of the supper had been disposed of and the mere palate-tickling period of the dessert had come, I was much interested in observing that the talk--mainly carried on by the elders--was turned with an obviously deliberate purpose upon family history; and especially upon the doings of those who in the past had brought honour upon the family name. And I was still more interested when, later, the Vidame informed me that it is the Provencal custom at the Christmas festival for the old thus to instruct the young and so to keep family tradition alive. No doubt there is in this a dim survival of ancestor-worship; but I should be glad to see so excellent a relic of paganism preserved in the Christmas ritual of my own land. The chief ancestral glory of the family of the Mazet is its close blood-relationship with the gallant Andre Etienne: that drummer of the Fifty-first Demi-brigade of the Army of Italy who is commemorated on the frieze of the Pantheon, and who is known and honoured as the "Tambour d'Arcole" all over France. It was delightful to listen to old Jan's telling of the brave story: how this Andre, their own kinsman, swam the stream under the enemy's fire at Arcolo with his drum on his back and then drummed his fellow-soldiers on to victory; how the First Consul awarded him the drum-sticks of honour, and later--when the Legion of Honour was founded--gave him the cross; how they carved him in stone, drumming the charge, up there on the front of the Pantheon in Paris itself; how Mistral, the great poet of Provence, had made a poem about him that had been printed in a book; and how, crowning glory, they had set up his marble statue in Cadenet--the little town, not far from Avignon, where he was born!