a newly-ploughed field, instead of following the fortunes of the
vehicle and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either
miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
under it.

We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture, I understood
that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's house. It
troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked
wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token
of farewell, and his head sank, and he died. His death was the
only fatal accident caused by the overturn.

"But it was partly his own fault," the coachman said to me.