“Do me the favor, ma belle, to accept it—­for my sake,” said I, thankful to find her so easily entertained.  I was lying in a shady angle of old wall, puffing away at a cigar, with my hat over my eyes, and the soles of my boots levelled at the view.  It is difficult to smoke and make love at the same time; and I preferred the tobacco.

Josephine was enchanted, and thanked me in a thousand pretty, foolish phrases.  She declared she saw ever so much farther and clearer with the glass, now that it was her own.  She looked at me through it, and insisted that I should look at her.  She picked out all sorts of marvellous objects, at all sorts of incredible distances.  In short, she prattled and chattered till I forgot all about the washing-tub, and again began to think her quite charming.  Presently we heard wandering sounds of music among the trees at the foot of the hill—­sounds as of a violin and bagpipes; now coming with the wind from the west, now dying away to the north, now bursting out afresh more merrily than ever, and leading off towards the village.

“Tiens! that must be a wedding!” said Josephine, drumming with her little feet against the side of the old well on which she was sitting.

“A wedding! what connection subsists, pray, between the bonds of matrimony, and a tune on the bagpipes?”

“I don’t know what you mean by bagpipes—­I only know that when people get married in the country, they go about with the musicians playing before them.  What you hear yonder is a violin and a cornemuse.”

“A cornemuse!” I repeated.  “What’s that?”

“Oh, country music.  A thing you blow into with your mouth, and play upon with your fingers, and squeeze under your arm—­like this.”

“Then it’s the same thing, ma chere,” said I.  “A bagpipes and a cornemuse—­a cornemuse and bagpipes.  Both of them national, popular, and frightful.”

“I’m so fond of music,” said Josephine.

Not wishing to object to her tastes, and believing that this observation related to the music then audible, I made no reply.

“And I have never been to an opera,” added she.

I was still silent, though from another motive.

“You will take me one night to the Italiens, or the Opera Comique, will you not, Monsieur Basil?” pursued she, determined not to lose her opportunity.

I had now no resource but to promise; which I did, very reluctantly.

“You would enjoy the Opera Comique far more than the Italiens,” said I, remembering that Madame de Marignan had a box at the Italiens, and rapidly weighing the chances for and against the possibility of recognition.  “At the first they sing in French—­at the last, in Italian,”

“Ah, bah!  I should prefer the French,” replied she, falling at once into the snare.  “When shall it be—­this week?”

“Ye—­es; one evening this week.”