The men linger half outside and half in, with their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles, with that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the _bonhomie_, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or forty thousand francs securely laid by. And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been accused, I believe, of pretentions to what is called _illuminisme_; but even in his most illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that briefest of village names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains--Gy of the Little Nuns. I went with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty _calotte_, stood there a moment in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than words.