and seeing all that I saw by holding my hand with the other.

By slow degrees the scenes and people evoked grew less dim, and whenever
the splendid and important lady, whom we soon identified for certain as
Gatienne, our common great-great-grandmother, appeared--"la belle
verriere de Verny le Moustier"--she was more distinct than the others;
no doubt, because we both had part and parcel in her individuality, and
also because her individuality was so strongly marked.

And before I was called away at the inexorable hour, we had the supreme
satisfaction of seeing her play the fiddle to a shadowy company of
patched and powdered and bewigged ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to
take much sympathetic delight in her performance, and actually, even, of
just hearing the thin, unearthly tones of that most original and
exquisite melody, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," to a quite inaudible
accompaniment on the spinet by her daughter, evidently Anne Herault,
Comtesse de Boismorinel (_nee_ Budes), while the small child Jeanne de
Boismorinel (afterwards Dame Pasquier de la Mariere) listened with
dreamy rapture.

And, just as Mary had said, she played her fiddle with its body
downward, and resting on her knees, as though it had been an undersized
'cello. I then vaguely remembered having dreamed of such a figure when a
small child.

Within twenty-four hours of this strange adventure the practical and
business-like Mary had started, in the flesh and with her maid, for that
part of France where these, my ancestors, had lived, and within a
fortnight she had made herself mistress of all my French family history,
and had visited such of the different houses of my kin as were still in