Coming home one day from his professional round, the malignant and vicious old man came across a bewitching little girl at the edge of some fields that lay along the avenue de Tivoli.  Hearing the horse, the child sprang up from the bottom of one of the many brooks which are to be seen from the heights of Issoudun, threading the meadows like ribbons of silver on a green robe.  Naiad-like, she rose suddenly on the doctor’s vision, showing the loveliest virgin head that painters ever dreamed of.  Old Rouget, who knew the whole country-side, did not know this miracle of beauty.  The child, who was half naked, wore a forlorn little petticoat of coarse woollen stuff, woven in alternate strips of brown and white, full of holes and very ragged.  A sheet of rough writing paper, tied on by a shred of osier, served her for a hat.  Beneath this paper—­covered with pot-hooks and round O’s, from which it derived the name of “schoolpaper”—­the loveliest mass of blonde hair that ever a daughter of Eve could have desired, was twisted up, and held in place by a species of comb made to comb out the tails of horses.  Her pretty tanned bosom, and her neck, scarcely covered by a ragged fichu which was once a Madres handkerchief, showed edges of the white skin below the exposed and sun-burned parts.  One end of her petticoat was drawn between the legs and fastened with a huge pin in front, giving that garment the look of a pair of bathing drawers.  The feet and the legs, which could be seen through the clear water in which she stood, attracted the eye by a delicacy which was worthy of a sculptor of the middle ages.  The charming limbs exposed to the sun had a ruddy tone that was not without beauty of its own.  The neck and bosom were worthy of being wrapped in silks and cashmeres; and the nymph had blue eyes fringed with long lashes, whose glance might have made a painter or a poet fall upon his knees.  The doctor, enough of an anatomist to trace the exquisite figure, recognized the loss it would be to art if the lines of such a model were destroyed by the hard toil of the fields.

“Where do you come from, little girl?  I have never seen you before,” said the old doctor, then sixty-two years of age.  This scene took place in the month of September, 1799.

“I belong in Vatan,” she answered.

Hearing Rouget’s voice, an ill-looking man, standing at some distance in the deeper waters of the brook, raised his head.  “What are you about, Flore?” he said, “While you are talking instead of catching, the creatures will get away.”

“Why have you come here from Vatan?” continued the doctor, paying no heed to the interruption.

“I am catching crabs for my uncle Brazier here.”

“Rabouiller” is a Berrichon word which admirably describes the thing it is intended to express; namely, the action of troubling the water of a brook, making it boil and bubble with a branch whose end-shoots spread out like a racket.  The crabs, frightened by this operation, which they do not understand, come hastily to the surface, and in their flurry rush into the net the fisher has laid for them at a little distance.  Flore Brazier held her “rabouilloir” in her hand with the natural grace of childlike innocence.