At all events, it had the refreshing charm of novelty: there was the fishing, and the King's Warren trout stream was a good one. Before he had filled his creel at the pretty stream that artists used to come to paint, the girls would come down to count the spoil and walk with him through the cool lane, to conduct this most fortunate of men back to the squire's well-supplied breakfast table. Then the model husband would pass the morning in a lounge chair in the shadiest corner of the rose garden, with a big cigar in his mouth, contemplating with lazy satisfaction his prize baby and his handsome wife, while the fair-haired Lucy would swing in the Mexican hammock he had brought her as a souvenir of his American experiences, gaily singing her little scraps of rather risky French songs, which, though he did not understand them, always amused him. The little songs, too, appeared to give intense delight to Mademoiselle Fanchette; that muscular specimen of womanhood would shake with inward laughter, and fluently compliment her younger mistress. "Ah!" she would say, "if mademoiselle had only been a poor girl, what a position! all Paris would be at the feet of the beautiful miss. Why, the _café-concerts_ would be struggling to possess her. Ah, what an enviable position!" Stimulated by this honest praise, Lucy Warrender would delight her little audience with "La Vénus aux Carottes," or some other well-known ditty of a similar nature. Old Warrender would lean on his daisy-spud a pleased spectator of the Arcadian scene. It delighted him to observe Haggard's suddenly awakened delight in the simple pleasures of country life, and the old gentleman's admiration of Monsieur, Madame and Bébé was unbounded. The afternoons were enlivened by the unceremonious dropping in of sympathetic visitors; the Reverend John Dodd and his wife were welcome guests, and tea in the garden became quite a function.