business, however direful may be the plight in which he finds himself. Pale, uncared for, haggard as he looked in the morning light, his bosom’s lord sat more lightly upon its throne than it had done since he left England. So far even as appearances went, there was this good in Mr Goulburn’s false decorations of hair, that they did not grow in the night. They passed through a number of villages, changing horses with much noise and clangour here and there--a proceeding which cheered up Janey almost as much as the thoughts of a bargain did her father; and through one quaint and wonderful town, all walled and embattled, where the lanterns still hung across the streets as in the days when aristocrats were hanged by that easy method of getting rid of an undesirable intruder; and by dreary old _châteaux_, grey and homely, without any softening of trees or park to link them to the surrounding country. By-and-by, after a long, long waste of road, they came upon the masses of trees which had hung upon the horizon like clouds, and which showed where Count Vieux-bois’s estates began. Beautiful feathery larches, big pines, and sturdy oaks clothed the slopes, and changed the whole character of the country. And after a while the diligence rattled into a long village street with a church at one end and a quaint old castle at the other, more imposing than anything they had yet seen. The street was irregular, now broad, now narrow, widening out in the centre into a kind of place or square, in which there were two or three white houses, several storeys high, with green _persiennes_ half closed. The rest of the place consisted of cottages, mostly thatched and humble, with a little post-office, and a cavernous shop in which were all kinds of possible and impossible goods. The “general merchant” of France is different from him of England, just as _sabots_ and blouses are different from country-made shoes and fustian coats. And at Latour the _sabots_ and the blouses were universal. M. le Curé himself wore a pair over his shoes in bad weather, leaving them at the door of every house he visited. The diligence stopped with a jarring shock and noise, suddenly drawn up before the humble door of another Lion d’Or, a popular sign in the district. But this one was little more than an _auberge_, a village public-house, with its description posted up in straggling letters, _ICI on loge à Pied et à CHEVAL_. There was no _porte cochère_, no courtyard to mark the importance of the hotel, but only a _salle à manger_ looking out upon the pavement, low-roofed and dark, and smelling as usual, but worse than usual, of bad cigars and the _pot au feu_.