"Un corbeau apprivoisé" (a tame crow), said Vesper, lifting his cap.
"Un corbeau privé, we say," she replied, shyly. "You speak the good French, like the priests out of France."
She was not a very young woman, nor was she very pretty, but she was delightfully modest and retiring in her manner, and Vesper, leaning against the fence, assured her that he feared the Acadiens were lacking in a proper appreciation of their ability to speak their own language.
After a time he looked over the fields behind her cottage, and asked the name of a church crowning a hill in the distance.
"It is the Saulnierville church," she replied, "but you must not walk so far. You will stay to dinner?"
While Vesper was politely declining her invitation, a Frenchman with a long, pointed nose, and bright, sharp eyes, came around the corner of the house.
"He is my husband," said the woman. "Edouard, this gentleman speaks the good French."
The Acadien warmly seconded the invitation of his wife that Vesper should stay to dinner, but he escaped from them with smiling thanks and a promise to come another day.
"They never saw me before, and they asked me to stay to dinner. That is true hospitality,—they have not been infected. I will make my way back to the inn, and interview that sulky beggar."