Madeleine and Bribri were wild with joy, while their mother was labouring in search of a rhyme, and did not attend to the real eclogue which was about to be commenced.  They scarcely took time to breakfast.—­“They dressed themselves coquettishly”—­so Madame Deshoulieres wrote to Mascaron—­“they cut with their own hands a crook a-piece in the park—­they beautified them with ribands.  Madeleine was for the blue ribands, Bribri for the rose colour.  Oh, the gentle shepherdesses! they spent a whole hour in finding a name they liked.  At last, Madeleine fixed on Amaranthe, Bribri on Daphne.  I have just seen them gliding among the trees that overshadow the lovely stream.—­Poor shepherdesses! be on your guard against the wolves.”

At noon that very day Madeleine and Bribri, or rather Amaranthe and Daphne, in grey silk petticoats and satin bodies, with their beautiful hair in a state of most careful disorder, and with their crooks in hand, conducted the twelve sheep out of the park into the meadows.  The flock, which seemed to be very hungry, were rather troublesome and disobedient.  The shepherdesses did all they could to keep them in the proper path.  It was a delicious mixture of bleatings, and laughter, and baaings, and pastoral songs.  The happy girls inhaled the soul of nature, as their poetical mamma expressed it.  They ran—­they threw themselves on the blooming grass—­they looked at themselves in the limpid waters of the Lignon—­they gathered lapfulls of primroses.  The flock made the best use of their time; and every now and then a sheep of more observation than the rest, perceiving they were guarded by such extraordinary shepherdesses, took half an hour’s diversion among the fresh-springing corn.

“That’s one of yours,” said Amaranthe.

“No; ’tis yours,” replied Daphne; but, by way of having no difficulties in future, they resolved to divide the flock, and ornament one-half with blue collars, and the other with rose-colour.  And they gave a name also to each of the members of their flock, such as Meliboeus, and Jeannot, and Robin, and Blanchette.  Twelve more poetical sheep were never fed on grass before.  When the sun began to sink, the shepherdesses brought back their flocks.  Madame Deshoulieres cried with joy.  “Oh, my dear girls!” she said, kissing their fair foreheads; “it is you that have composed an eclogue, and not I.”

“Nothing is wanting to the picture,” said the Duchess, seating herself under the willows of the watering-place, and admiring the graceful girls.

“I think we want a dog,” said Daphne.

“No; we are rather in want of a wolf,” whispered the beautiful Amaranthe—­and blushed.

CHAPTER II.