six
in the morning
He nearly always spoke like a peasant , although he was really a decently educated man -- or should have been . His old mother , who was of good family and eighty years of age lived in a quite humble cottage in a small street in La Tremblaye , with two little peasant girls to wait on her ; and the La Tremblayes , with whom M. Laferté was not on speaking terms , were always coming into the village to see her and bring her fruit and flowers and game . She was a most accomplished old lady , and an excellent musician , and had known Monsieur de Lafayette . We breakfasted with her when we alighted from the diligence at six in the morning ; and she took such a fancy to Barty that her own grandson was almost forgotten . He sang to her , and she sang to him , and showed him autograph letters of Lafayette , and a lock of her hair when she was seventeen , and old-fashioned miniatures of her father and mother , Monsieur and Madame de something I 've quite forgotten . M. Laferté kept a pack of bassets -LRB- a kind of bow-legged beagle -RRB- , and went shooting with them every day in the forest , wet or dry ; sometimes we three boys with him . He lent us guns -- an old single-barrelled flint-lock cavalry musket or carbine fell to my share ; and I knew happiness such as I had never known yet .