for a whistling baker-boy who halted before doorways set deep in white stucco to deliver little breads from his ample head-basket. The round-skirted women who answered his call, the roofs that sloped toward the lintels of the opened doors were as veritably French as though the mother country were not an ocean apart from this colonial child.
We inquired for a hotel. A lusty idler replied in surprising pure accent that there were boarding-houses only, and but three of those. The coiffeur's behind the magasin of Monsieur Frecker might suit, only—Madame would perhaps find it not to her taste having to pass always through the hair-dressing shop to reach the family rooms. So that left two. . . . And both were on corners of the same streets, and the cuisine was as reputed at one as at the other.
Thus with no prejudices to guide us we sought a cinder road which left the quay near an archaic and water-less fountain and took its up-hill way past windows wherein watches and demijohns, tinted saints and merchandise would later in the day induce custom. Houses and shops were nearly all of dun-painted wood. Door-steps rose immediately from the roadway as in other French villages. And upper casements gazed directly upon the heads of the two strangers who paused to tap discreetly, for it was not yet seven o'clock, upon a certain green panel.
If we had known that Madame C had but
