THE

GOOD OLD TIMES.

A

CHAPTER I.

Where's Christophe ?

T the door of a cottage, in one of those wide

valleys girdled by craggy mountains which one sees in Auvergne, stood a healthy, black-eyed girl in a snow-white cap, blue petticoat, and geranium-coloured apron, looking eagerly forth, and shading her eyes with her hand from the mid-day sun. It was the latter end of autumn; the harvest and vintage were over, and the birches, larches, and aspens which sprang up in the fissures of the distant mountains, were clad in every variety of colour, while the rocks themselves emulated their dyes in never-ending gradations of purple, lilac,

B

dark green, umber, tawny, grey, and pale brown, till they joined the well-watered meadows at their feet. In the midst of the valley, at the distance of several miles from the cottage, suddenly rose a gigantic, precipitous mount, crowned with a feudal castle, and supporting on its sides an irregular, closely - built town, including sundry churches and a cathedral. A little apart from this huge pile, but closely adjoining it, shot up a sugar-loaf rock, shivered into peaks sharp as needles, and apparently too perpendicular and precipitous to be accessible to the foot of man, yet crested at its summit by a church-spire.

These rocks now lay bathed in a golden haze; but though they would have riveted the regards of a stranger, the girl was too familiar with them to bestow on them any attention, and was absorbed in looking down a rough track, hardly deserving the name of a road, which traversed the valley and passed the cottage-door.

Some one was slowly advancing along it, who, as he drew nearer, caused her to mutter rather impatiently," "Tis not he."

When the pedestrian approached, he proved to be a middle-aged man of pleasant, acute, and