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Miette was enveloped in a long brown hooded cloak reaching to her feet, and leaving only her head and hands visible. The women of the lower classes in Provence the peasantry and workpeople still wear these ample cloaks, which are called pelisses; it is a fashion which must have lasted for ages. Miette had thrown back her hood on arriving.

In front, there was the head of a boat driving up upon the white beach, and figure after figure leaping out, and hastening to be welcomed in the porch; while, in the midst of the greeting, the quick and regular beat of a horse's feet was heard on the frozen ground, and the active little animal rushed into the light, shaking his mane and jingling his bells, till suddenly checked by the driver, who stood upright at the back of the sledge, while the ladies reclined, so wrapped in furs that nothing could be seen of them till they had entered the house, and issued forth from the room where they threw off their pelisses and cloaks.

When, therefore, instead of that grand column which had conquered Moscow, its soldiers perceived behind Napoleon only a train of spectres covered with tattered vestments of every kind, women's pelisses, pieces of carpet, or dirty cloaks, half burned and riddled by the fires, and with nothing but rags on their feet, their consternation was extreme.

In another shop were two pelisses of faded lilac color; these were of modern cut and fashionably made. On enquiring how they became possessed of these articles, I was told they were some wrecks of European vessels on which no people were found, whilst others made no scruple of averring that they were formerly the property of people who had died in the country.

Ladies had their gowns and pelisses made very short-waisted, and as tight and narrow as they could be, though with enormous sleeves in them, and their hair in little curls on their foreheads. Old ladies wore turbans in evening dress; and both they and their daughters had immense bonnets and hats, with a high crown and very large front. In the 1820, the good old king passed away.

Those were yellow, copper-colored, lean, and slightly clad in garments of cotton cloth; these were rosy as children and fat as pigs: they were besides wrapped up in four or five pelisses, worn one over the other, lined with sheepskins, so that a single man smelt like a whole flock of sheep.

Then there were drawing-books for Cherry, and a knife of endless blades for Lance, and toys for the little ones; and dresses a suit for Wilmet like Alda's plainest Sunday one, and Alda's last year's silk for Geraldine, and some charming little cashmere pelisses Aunt Mary's special present to the two babies things that would lengthen Wilmet's purse for many a day to come; and a writing-case for Felix; and all the absent remembered, too.

Our Chasseurs took a large number of excellent horses and gold-braided pelisses.

He only looked upon the land, however, declared he saw nothing of those he was expecting, and began to warm himself as he stood, by repeatedly clapping his arms across his breast, in the way that hackney-coachmen and porters do in England. This was Hund. He could not have been known by his figure, for all persons look alike in wolf-skin pelisses; but the voice and the action were his.

The last time we were out was in 1803, when the Prince of Wales reviewed us, and when we wore French gray jackets, leathers, red morocco boots, crimson pelisses, brass helmets with leopard-skin and a white plume, and the regulation pig-tail of eighteen inches. That dress will hardly answer at present, and must be modified, of coarse. We were called the White Feathers, in those days.