She had a curious fad, this hermit baroness of the big woods.  She loved nature and was a naturalist of no poor attainments.  Wasps and hornets were the special study of this remarkable woman.  There were at least a score of their nests on her front portico—­big and little, and some of them oddly shaped.  She hunted them in wood and field.  When she found a nest she had it moved carefully after nightfall, under a bit of netting, and fastened somewhere about the gables.  Around the Hermitage there were many withered boughs and briers holding cones of wrought fibre, each a citadel of these uniformed soldiers of the air and the poisoned arrow.  They were assembled in colonies of yellow, white, blue, and black wasps, and white-faced hornets.  She had no fear of them, and, indeed, no one of the household was ever stung to my knowledge.  I have seen her stand in front of her door and feed them out of a saucer.  There were special favorites that would light upon her palm, overrunning its pink hollow and gorging at the honey-drop.

“They will never sting,” she would say, “if one does not declare the war.  To strike, to make any quick motion, it gives them anger.  Then, mon cher ami! it is terrible.  They cause you to burn, to ache, to make a great noise, and even to lie down upon the ground.  If people come to see me, if I get a new servant, I say:  ’Make to them no attention, and they will not harm you.’”

In the house I have seen her catch one by the wings on a window and, holding it carefully ask me to watch her captive—­sometimes a a great daredevil hornet, lion-maned—­as he lay stabbing with his poison-dagger.

“Now,” said she, “he is angry; he will remember.  If I release him he will sting me when I come near him again.  So I do not permit him to live—­I kill him.”

Then she would impale him and invite me to look at him with the microscope.

One day the baroness went away to town with the young ladies.  I was quite alone with the servants.  Father Joulin of the chateau came over and sat awhile with me, and told me how he had escaped the Parisian mob, a night in the Reign of Terror.  Late in the afternoon I walked awhile in the grove with him.  When he left I went slowly down the trail over which I had ridden.  My strength was coming fast.  I felt like an idle man, shirking the saddle, when I should be serving my country.  I must to my horse and make an end to dallying.  With thoughts like these for company, I went farther than I intended.  Returning over the bushy trail I came suddenly upon—­Louison!  She was neatly gowned in pink and white.

“Le diable!” said she.  “You surprise me.  I thought you went another way.”

“Or you would not have taken this one,” I said.

“Of course not,” said she.  “One does not wish to find men if she is hunting for—­for—­” she hesitated a moment, blushing—­“mon Dieu! for bears,” she added.

I thought then, as her beautiful eyes looked up at me smiling, that she was incomparable, that I loved her above all others—­I felt sure of it.