The gate, which was opened for Blondet by a very pretty girl, was of time-worn wood clamped with iron.
The keeper, wakened by the creaking of the hinges, put his nose out of the window and showed himself in his night-shirt.
"So our keepers sleep till this time of day!" thought the Parisian, who thought himself very knowing in rural customs.
After a walk of about quarter of an hour, he reached the sources of the river above Conches, where his ravished eyes beheld one of those landscapes that ought to be described, like the history of France, in a thousand volumes or in only one.

We must here content ourselves with two paragraphs.
A projecting rock, covered with dwarf trees and abraded at its base by the Avonne, to which circumstance it owes a slight resemblance to an enormous turtle lying across the river, forms an arch through which the eye takes in a little sheet of water, clear as a mirror, where the stream seems to sleep until it reaches in the distance a series of cascades falling among huge rocks, where little weeping willows with elastic motion sway back and forth to the flow of waters.
Beyond these cascades is the hillside, rising sheer, like a Rhine rock clothed with moss and heather, gullied like it, again, by sharp ridges of schist and mica sending down, here and there, white foaming rivulets to which a little meadow, always watered and always green, serves as a cup; farther on, beyond the picturesque chaos and in contrast to this wild, solitary nature, the gardens of Conches are seen, with the village roofs and the clock-tower and the outlying fields.
There are the two paragraphs, but the rising sun, the purity of the air, the dewy sheen, the melody of woods and waters--imagine them! "Almost as charming as at the Opera," thought Blondet, making his way along the banks of the unnavigable portion of the Avonne, whose caprices contrast with the straight and deep and silent stream of the lower river, flowing between the tall trees of the forest of Les Aigues.
Blondet did not proceed far on his morning walk, for he was presently brought to a stand-still by the sight of a peasant,--one of those who, in this drama, are supernumeraries so essential to its action that it may be doubted whether they are not in fact its leading actors.
When the clever journalist reached a group of rocks where the main stream is imprisoned, as it were, between two portals, he saw a man standing so motionless as to excite his curiosity, while the clothes and general air of this living statue greatly puzzled him.
The humble personage before him was a living presentment of the old men dear to Charlet's pencil; resembling the troopers of that Homer of soldiery in a strong frame able to endure hardship, and his immortal skirmishers in a fiery, crimson, knotted face, showing small capacity for submission.

A coarse felt hat, the brim of which was held to the crown by stitches, protected a nearly bald head from the weather; below it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly have paid four francs an hour to copy,--a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that in all the classical representations of Deity.

It was easy to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the trencher.

His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles.