Mr. Stevenson; and much good profit had he of the adventure. For it was
his common practice to go to bed with the birds and rise with the sun;
and more often than not he lodged in the inn of the silver moon, with
moss for a couch, leafy boughs for a canopy and the stars for
night-lights--accommodations infinitely more agreeable than those
afforded by the grubby and malodorous auberge of the wayside average.
And between sun and sun he punished his boots famously.

Constant exercise tuned up muscles gone slack and soft with easy
living, upland winds cleansed the man of the reek of cities and made
his appetite a thing appalling. A keen sun darkened his face and hands,
brushed up in his cheeks a warmer glow than they had shown in many a
year, and faded out the heavier lines with which Time had marked his
countenance. Moreover, because this was France, where one may affect a
whisker without losing face, he neglected his razors; and though this
was not his first thought, a fair disguise it proved. For when, toward
the end of the second week, he submitted that wanton luxuriance to be
tamed by a barber of Florac, he hardly knew the trimly bearded mask of
bronze that looked back at him from a mirror.

Not that it mattered to Monsieur Duchemin. From the first he met few of
any sort and none at all whom a lively and exacting distrust reckoned a
likely factor in his affairs. It was a wild, bold land he traversed,
and thinly peopled; at pains to avoid the larger towns, he sought by
choice the loneliest paths that looped its quiet hills; such as passed
the time of day with him were few and for the most part peasants, a
dull, dour lot, taciturn to a degree that pleased him well. So that he
soon forgot to be forever alert for the crack of an ambushed pistol or
the pattering footfalls of an assassin with a knife.