The old woman who sat near the window worked diligently with her
distaff laden with hemp, except when the flashing lightning made her
stop to raise her thin hand to her forehead. She was twisting the
thread from which the sheets of the country are made. They are coarse,
but they last longer than the hands that work the hemp, and descend
from mother to daughter.

More than two hours I waited in this auberge while the rain fell in
torrents, the lightning blazed, and the thunder crashed. The whole sky
was the colour of slate. When at length a line of bright light
appeared in the western sky, I could curb my impatience no longer,
and, hoisting my pack, I was soon on the road to Carennac.

A little beyond the village I passed a gipsy encampment ranged along
the side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents;
but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over
with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin
and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of
the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young
burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled
their mouths with dust. Small portable stoves--alas! not the
traditional fire with three stakes set in the ground and tied at the
top, with the pot swinging therefrom--had been lighted outside the
caravans, and gipsy women were making the evening soup. Bright-eyed,
shock-headed, uncombed, unwashed, but exceedingly happy gipsy children
were tumbling over one another on the wet turf, showing so much of
their brown skin between their rags that they would have been more
comfortable and quite as decent had they been naked. A hideous old
man, merely skin and bones, sitting nose and knees together upon a