LED ASTRAY.

CHAPTER I.

A Graphic description.

George L——­ to Paul B., Paris.

Rozel, 15th September.

It’s nine o’clock in the evening, my dear friend, and you have just arrived from Germany.  They hand you my letter, the post-mark of which informs you at once that I am absent from Paris.  You indulge in a gesture of annoyance, and call me a vagabond.  Nevertheless, you settle down in your best arm-chair, you open my letter, and you hear that I have been for the past five days domesticated in a flour-mill in Lower Normandy.  In a flour-mill!  What the duse can he be doing in a mill?  A wrinkle appears on your forehead, your eyebrows are drawn together; you lay down my letter for a moment; you attempt to penetrate this mystery by the unaided power of your imagination.  Suddenly a playful expression beams upon your countenance; your mouth expresses the irony of a wise man tempered by the indulgence of a friend; you have caught a glimpse, through an opera-comique cloud, of a miller’s pretty wife with powdered hair, a waist all trimmed with gay ribbons, a light and short skirt, and stockings with gilded clocks; in short, one of those fair young millers’ wives whose heart goes pit-a-pat with hautboy accompaniment.  But the graces who are ever sporting in your mind sometimes lead it astray; my fair miller is as much like the creature of your imagination as I am like a youthful Colin; her head is adorned with a towering cotton night-cap to which the thickest possible coating of flour fails to restore its primitive color; she wears a coarse woolen petticoat which would abrade the hide of an elephant; in short, it frequently happens to me to confound the miller’s wife with the miller himself, after which it is sufficient to add that I am not the least curious to know whether or not her heart goes pit-a-pat.  The truth is, that, not knowing how to kill time in your absence, and having no reason to expect you to return before another month; (it’s your own fault!), I solicited a mission.  The council-general of the department of ——­ had lately, and quite opportunely, expressed officially the wish that a certain ruined abbey, called Rozel Abbey, should be classed among historical monuments.  I have been commissioned to investigate closely the candidate’s titles.  I hastened with all possible speed to the chief town of this artistic department, where I effected my entrance with the important gravity of a man who holds within his hands the life or the death of a monument dear to the country.  I made some inquiries at the hotel; great was my mortification when I discovered that no one seemed to suspect that such a thing as Rozel Abbey existed within a circuit of a hundred leagues.  I called at the prefecture while still laboring under the effect of this disappointment; the prefect, Valton, whom you know very well, received