“You must lie quite still,” said she; “you must not try to move till I come back with help, or your leg will be hurt more.”

With that she went away, and presently returned with two strong men and the long shutter of a shop-window.  To this extempore litter she carefully moved the Frenchman, and then her neighbors lifted him and carried him into the parlor, where Miss Lucinda’s chintz lounge was already spread with a tight-pinned sheet to receive the poor man, and while her helpers put him to bed she put on her bonnet and ran for the doctor.

Doctor Colton did his best for his patient, but pronounced it an impossibility to remove him till the bone should be joined firmly, as a thorough cure was all-essential to his professional prospects.  And now, indeed, Miss Lucinda had her hands full.  A nurse could not be afforded, but Monsieur Leclerc was added to the list of old Israel’s “chores,” and what other nursing he needed Miss Lucinda was glad to do; for her kind heart was full of self-reproaches to think it was her pig that had knocked down the poor man, and her mop-handle that had twisted itself across and under his leg, and aided, if not caused, its breakage.  So Israel came in four or five times a day to do what he could, and Miss Lucinda played nurse at other times to the best of her ability.  Such flavorous gruels and porridges as she concocted! such tisanes after her guest’s instructions! such dainty soups, and sweetbreads, and cutlets, served with such neatness!  After his experience of a second-rate boarding-house, Monsieur Leclerc thought himself in a gastronomic paradise.  Moreover, these tiny meals were garnished with flowers, which his French taste for color and decoration appreciated:  two or three stems of lilies-of-the-valley in their folded green leaves, cool and fragrant; a moss-rosebud and a spire of purple-gray lavender bound together with ribbon-grass; or three carnations set in glittering myrtle-sprays, the last acquisition of the garden.

Miss Lucinda enjoyed nursing thoroughly, and a kindlier patient no woman ever had.  Her bright needle flew faster than ever through the cold linen and flaccid cambric of the shirts and cravats she fashioned, while he told her, in his odd idioms, stories of his life in France, and the curious customs both of society and cuisinerie, with which last he showed a surprising acquaintance.  Truth to tell, when Monsieur Leclerc said he had been a member of the Duc de Montmorenci’s household, he withheld the other half of this truth,—­that he had been his valet-de-chambre:  but it was an hereditary service, and seemed to him as different a thing from common servitude as a peer’s office in the bedchamber differs from a lackey’s.  Indeed, Monsieur Leclerc was a gentleman in his own way,—­not of blood, but of breeding; and while he had faithfully served the “aristocrats,” as his father had done before him, he did not limit that service to their prosperity, but in their greatest