It is the fair and pleasant land of France--a land of corn-fields and orchards and sunny garden-plots, where quiet villages nestle in shady nooks, and old châteaux stand proudly amidst their sheltering woods. You feel everywhere that this land has been for many a century tilled and cared for by the hand of man; that generation after generation sleeps in peace beneath the shadow of its gray old churches. Long ages of toil and civilization have left their impress here, and the present is the heir of a glorious and venerable past. Yet, perhaps no country has ever suffered more. War after war has swept over it; cruel oppression made the Revolution a terrible necessity; and, again, the excesses of the Revolution made men forget the crimes of the despotism that engendered it. And in the days of which we write there brooded over all the portentous shadow of another despotism--almost crushing enough to recall the worst days of Louis, falsely called the Magnificent, and of his thrice-accursed successor. Still, even in those evil times many a secluded nook seemed to be hidden in the hollow of His hand, so quietly did it slumber throughout all--escaping not indeed occasional suffering, but anything like general ruin. One such nook--a little pastoral village not a hundred miles from Paris--had in its immediate neighbourhood a spot yet more secluded, where a noble family of the “old _régime_” who otherwise might have wandered homeless exiles from their native land, found a welcome refuge. The simple four-roomed cottage, with the vine trained over its tiny porch, would have been an unpretending dwelling for the village smith or carpenter. Yet few could have looked on it attentively, even from the outside, and none could have entered it, without feeling sure that its inmates inherited the traditions of centuries of refinement and cultivation. The morning sun of one of the earliest days of 1812 was streaming into the little porch. The weather was mild and beautiful--unusually so for the season. One person was enjoying it thoroughly--a lad of about seventeen, who reclined in the porch, intent upon a book, while the sunshine streamed brightly over him, and the breeze gently lifted his soft brown hair. The expression of his face was rather sweet than strong--his forehead was good, his eyes large and dark, his mouth well-formed and sensitive, but lacking as yet the look of resolution that might come with riper manhood.