For though Farette came every Sunday evening and smoked by the fire, and looked at Julie as she arranged the details of her dowry, he only chuckled, and now and again struck his thigh and said: "Mon Dieu, the ankle, the eye, the good child, Julie, there!" Then he would fall to thinking and chuckling again.

One day he asked her to make him some potato-cakes of the flour he had given her.

Her answer was a catastrophe.

She could not cook; she was even ignorant of buttermilk-pudding.

He went away overwhelmed, but came back some days afterwards and made another speech.