BIRTH, VOUTH, AND MILITARY CAREER 5 
left his duties in the schoolroom, and accompanied 
us to the ancient structure. 
The modest chéteau stands a few rods to the west- 
ward of the little village, and was evidently the seat 
of the leading family of the place. It faces east and 
is a two-storied house of the shape seen everywhere 
in France, with its high, incurved roof; the walls, 
nearly a foot and a half thick, built of brick; the cor- 
ners and windows of blocks of white limestone. It is 
about fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. 
Above the roof formerly rose a small tower. There 
is no porch over the front door. Within, a rather nar- 
row hall passes through the centre, and opens into a 
large room on each side. What was evidently the 
drawing-room or sa/on was a spacious apartment with 
a low white wainscot and a heavy cornice. Over the 
large, roomy fireplace is a painting on the wood 
panel, representing a rural scene, in which a shep- 
herdess and her lover are engaged in other occupa- 
tions than the care of the flock of sheep visible in the 
distance. Over the doorway is a smaller but quaint 
painting of the same description. The house is unin- 
habited, and perhaps uninhabitable—indeed almost a 
ruin—and is used as a storeroom for wood and rub- 
bish by the peasants in the adjoining house to the 
left, on the south. 
The ground in front was cultivated with vegetables, 
not laid down to a lawn, and the land stretched back 
for perhaps three hundred to four hundred feet be- 
tween the old garden walls. 
Here, amid these rural scenes, even now so beau- 
tiful and tranquil, the subject of our sketch was 
