Everything there was at our disposal, the servants and all the animals in the stables.

One of our favorite amusements was the construction of enormous balloons, nine or ten feet high, and these we inflated by burning under them sheaves of hay; we then watched them rise and sail away and away, until they were lost to our sight high above the distant fields and woods.
The little St.Hermangardes were unlike other children; they had had all their instruction from a tutor, and their ideas were different from those one imbibes at boarding schools.

When there was any disagreement between us in regard to our games they always courteously gave in to me, and therefore my contact with them did not help me to meet the painful experiences of the future.
One day they came over and with much grace made me a present of a very rare butterfly.

It was of a pale yellow color, almost merging into light green, the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly, but its front wings were a shaded and exquisite pink, similar to the delicate rosy tints sometimes seen at daybreak.

They had captured it, they said, in the late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories,--they had caught hold of it so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon its brilliant coloring.