left in some of the furrows lines of water which sparkled in the sun
like slender silver threads. It was a blight, warm day, and the ground,
freshly opened by the sharp ploughshares, exhaled a slight vapor. At
the upper end of the field, an old man, whose broad back and stern face
recalled the man in Holbein's picture, but whose clothing did not
indicate poverty, gravely drove his old-fashioned _areau_, drawn by two
placid oxen, with pale yellow hides, veritable patriarchs of the fields,
tall, rather thin, with long, blunt horns, hard-working old beasts whom
long companionship has made _brothers_, as they are called in our
country districts, and who, when they are separated, refuse to work with
new mates and die of grief. People who know nothing of the country call
this alleged friendship of the ox for his yoke-fellow fabulous. Let them
go to the stable and look at a poor, thin, emaciated animal, lashing his
sunken sides with his restless tail, sniffing with terror and contempt
at the fodder that is put before him, his eyes always turned toward the
door, pawing the empty place beside him, smelling the yoke and chains
his companion wore, and calling him incessantly with a pitiful bellow.
The driver will say: "There's a yoke of oxen lost; his brother's dead,
and he won't work. We ought to fatten him for killing; but he won't eat,
and he'll soon starve to death."

The old ploughman was working slowly, in silence, without useless
expenditure of strength. His docile team seemed in no greater hurry
than he; but as he kept constantly at work, never turning aside, and
exerting always just the requisite amount of sustained power, his furrow
was as quickly cut as his son's, who was driving four less powerful oxen
on some harder and more stony land a short distance away.

But the spectacle that next attracted my attention was a fine one
indeed, a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the arable