As the sun rose next morning and shone in at the window of the diligence, the light fell upon her fair face and braided dark hair, as she lay asleep upon the shoulder of her father, who gazed upon her closed eyes and motionless features with that peculiar look of soft affection alone to be seen in the face of a parent. It was as lovely a picture as I ever saw. He caught my eyes fixed upon them; but there was nothing in my look that could give offence, and he smiled, looking back upon his child once more, and saying, "Pauvre enfant!" He spoke as if he felt at once that I could enter into all his sensations. Many a man--I am afraid many of my own countrymen--would conceal such feelings, simply from the fear of being laughed at; yet surely, of all sorts of _mauvaise honte_, that is the worst which makes us ashamed of what is pure and noble, and natural and beautiful. A few more leagues brought us to Bordeaux. But as I have a story to tell, I must not pause long even to give an idea of the town in which the scene is laid. I will allow myself two pages and a half. Bordeaux is certainly one of the handsomest towns in France., The old city, like most other old cities, is narrow and confined. The builders of that day seem to have imagined that there was not room enough in the world for them, and have therefore packed their edifices into as small a space as possible. The finest parts of the town are beyond the old walls, the line of which is still to be distinguished by the appellation of Fossé, given to the new streets, now built upon their former site. The river, being, as it were, the wet-nurse of Bordeaux, the houses have accumulated upon the bank, following the bend of the Garonne, in one of the most splendid crescents that can be conceived; and a beautiful bridge of seventeen arches, with a fine simple triumphal gate, at the end of the Rue des Salinières, adds not a little to the beauty of the scene. The town is formed, in general, of a light kind of stone, very easily worked, which, perhaps, is one cause why the private hotels and principal streets are so magnificently decorated in the upper stories--but it is in the upper stories alone, for the ground-floor is generally occupied by petty ill-contrived shops, and never by any means harmonizes with the higher parts of the building. I have seen the lower story of a princely habitation tenanted by a cobler, and a small pastry-cook's dirty shop below one of the finest houses in Bordeaux. The theatre, too, which is a very superb piece of architecture, has its arcades crammed full of book-stalls and old-clothes shops. In short, the incongruity which mingles more or less in everything French, shows itself nowhere more strongly than in the buildings of this town, certainly one of the most beautiful in France.