ABSTRACT
At the very moment when this order was going to be put in execution, Mad. de Fleury was sitting in the midst of the children, listening to Babet, who was reading Æsop’s fable of the old man and his sons. 46 Whilst her sister was reading, Victoire collected a number of twigs from the garden: she had just tied them together; and was going, by sister Frances’s desire, to let her companions try if they could break the bundle, when the attention of the moral of the fable was interrupted by the entrance of an old woman, whose countenance expressed the utmost terror and haste, to tell what she had not breath to utter. To Mad. de Fleury she was a stranger; but the children immediately recollected her to be the chestnut woman, to whom Babet had some years ago restored certain purloined chestnuts.
