they shine against the settling of thoughts degraded by alloy, of bitter regrets for a lost happiness.  Why do the names of the two estates purchased after the Restoration, and in which Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf both took the deepest interest, the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, move me more than the sacred names of the Holy Land or of Greece?  “Who loves, knows!” cried La Fontaine.  Those names possess the talismanic power of words uttered under certain constellations by seers; they explain magic to me; they awaken sleeping forms which arise and speak to me; they lead me to the happy valley; they recreate skies and landscape.  But such evocations are in the regions of the spiritual world; they pass in the silence of my own soul.  Be not surprised, therefore, if I dwell on all these homely scenes; the smallest details of that simple, almost common life are ties which, frail as they may seem, bound me in closest union to the countess.

The interests of her children gave Madame de Mortsauf almost as much anxiety as their health.  I soon saw the truth of what she had told me as to her secret share in the management of the family affairs, into which I became slowly initiated.  After ten years’ steady effort Madame de Mortsauf had changed the method of cultivating the estate.  She had “put it in fours,” as the saying is in those parts, meaning the new system under which wheat is sown every four years only, so as to make the soil produce a different crop yearly.  To evade the obstinate unwillingness of the peasantry it was found necessary to cancel the old leases and give new ones, to divide the estate into four great farms and let them on equal shares, the sort of lease that prevails in Touraine and its neighborhood.  The owner of the estate gives the house, farm-buildings, and seed-grain to tenants-at-will, with whom he divides the costs of cultivation and the crops.  This division is superintended by an agent or bailiff, whose business it is to take the share belonging to the owner; a costly system, complicated by the market changes of values, which alter the character of the shares constantly.  The countess had induced Monsieur de Mortsauf to cultivate a fifth farm, made up of the reserved lands about Clochegourde, as much to occupy his mind as to show other farmers the excellence of the new method by the evidence of facts.  Being thus, in a hidden way, the mistress of the estate, she had slowly and with a woman’s persistency rebuilt two of the farm-houses on the principle of those in Artois and Flanders.  It is easy to see her motive.  She wished, after the expiration of the leases on shares, to relet to intelligent and capable persons for rental in money, and thus simplify the revenues of Clochegourde.  Fearing to die before her husband, she was anxious to secure for him a regular income, and to her children a property which no incapacity could jeopardize.  At the present time the fruit-trees planted during the last ten years were in full bearing; the hedges, which