usual. Opposite, at the Cheval Blanc, there was the same tumult; but the village round about these two noisy places was as silent as a sleeping city. It was too cold for the women to stand about the doors and have their evening gossip. Helen went to her window and peeped out by the side of the blind when she had finished her mending. She could see M. Goudron’s house opposite, and her father standing in the moonlight outside the door. A little superstitious thrill ran through her, she could not tell why; and just then Antoine came up, and stood and talked. They came back to the inn together, the big hulking figure of the villager, in his blue blouse, towering over Mr Goulburn. Helen did not like the man, but her dislike of him did not seem enough to account for the sense of alarm with which she saw them cross the street together. She was relieved when her father came into the light under the window and entered the Lion d’Or. Old Goudron was one of those born fortune-makers whose gift is as little capable of being crushed by circumstances as is the genius of a poet. He would have amassed wealth on a desert island. He had dealt in every kind of merchandise in his day, and it was believed that the manner of his traffic had not been always blameless. He had gone through all the possible industries of the village: he had dealt in ship stores at Marseilles, in wine-casks at Dijon; he had pounced on a hundred small gainful speculations which only a keen microscopic eye, always intent on profit, could see. He had neglected nothing, overlooked nothing, by which a penny could be made. Even now that he was old, and the _richard_ of the village, supposed to possess unbounded wealth, his eyes were as keenly open as ever to all the possibilities of adding to his store. When he stood at his door with the handkerchief tied about his head nothing escaped him. If a child dropped a _sou_ on the road it was supposed that old Goudron picked it up. Money stuck to his fingers, the people said; they were half afraid of him, yet almost reverential of his genius. M. Goudron, however, to this one faculty, which is cosmopolitan, added others which belong more exclusively to his country. He scoffed at religion in all its forms, and he was republican of the republicans. He scoffed at most things, it is well to add. His long countenance, cut in two by the mockery of his characteristic grin, was that of a vulgar and mean Voltaire, always on the watch for an opportunity of reviling. Naturally such remains of his family as were left to him did everything that in them lay to thwart all the objects of his life. His children were dead, and he had but three grandchildren remaining to him in the world. Of these, two girls lived with him in his house, suffered all his caprices, and crossed him in every instinct of his nature; and the remaining one, his son’s son, his natural representative, was a spendthrift and good-for-nothing, abroad somewhere in the world, of whom