nightingales have come, and the great spring-tide festival of nature is beginning in the fields. 

 GEORGE SAND. 

 NOHANT, April, 1853. 

   CONTENTS. 

 First Evening Second Evening Third Evening Fourth Evening Fifth Evening Sixth Evening Seventh Evening Eighth Evening Ninth Evening Tenth Evening Eleventh Evening Twelfth Evening Thirteenth Evening Fourteenth Evening Fifteenth Evening Sixteenth Evening Seventeenth Evening Eighteenth Evening Nineteenth Evening Twentieth Evening Twenty-First Evening Twenty-Second Evening Twenty-Third Evening Twenty-Fourth Evening Twenty-Fifth Evening Twenty-Sixth Evening Twenty-Seventh Evening Twenty-Eighth Evening Twenty-Ninth Evening Thirtieth Evening Thirty-First Evening Thirty-Second Evening 

 THE BAGPIPERS. 

 FIRST EVENING. 

 I was not born yesterday, said Père Étienne in 1828. I came into the world, as near as I can make out, in the year 54 or 55 of the last century. But not remembering much of my earlier years, I shall only tell you about myself from the time of my first communion, which took place in '70 in the parish church of Saint-Chartier, then in charge of the Abbé Montpéron, who is now very deaf and broken down. 

 This was not because our own parish of Nohant was suppressed in those days; but our curate having died, the two churches were united for a time under the ministry of the priest of Saint-Chartier, and we went every day to be catechised,—that is, I and my little cousin and a lad named Joseph, who lived in the same house with my uncle, with a dozen other children of the neighborhood. 

 I say "my uncle" for short, but he was really my great-uncle, the brother of my grandmother, and was named Brulet; hence his little granddaughter and only heir was called Brulette, without any mention whatever of her Christian name, which was Catherine. 

 Now, to tell you at once about things as they were, I soon felt that I loved Brulette better than I was obliged to do as a cousin; and I was jealous because Joseph lived in the same house, which stood about a stone's throw distant from the last houses in the village and rather more than three quarters of a mile from mine,—so that he could see her at all times, while I saw her only now and then, till the time when we met to be catechised. 

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