and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.

Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and
Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and
all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage
ceremony? The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along;
the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods,
banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money
lasts. A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer
sense of modesty,--that which hides from the public eye and
inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy
burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and
exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers.
One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to
escape both the world and their family. The love which begins a
marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a
treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women
reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of
uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three
letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising
to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find
themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband's heart, do not,
as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage,
they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the
baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down
their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons
when they say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be