THE DEVIL'S POOL

I

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

A la sueur de ton visaige
Tu gagnerois ta pauvre vie,
Après long travail et usaige,
Voicy la _mort_ qui te convie.[1]


The quatrain in old French written below one of Holbein's pictures is
profoundly sad in its simplicity. The engraving represents a ploughman
driving his plough through a field. A vast expanse of country stretches
away in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is
setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The
peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four
horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is
buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in
that scene of _sweat and toil_. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton
armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified horses
and belabors them, thus serving the old husbandman as ploughboy. This
spectre, which Holbein has introduced allegorically in the succession of
philosophical and religious subjects, at once lugubrious and burlesque,
entitled the _Dance of Death_, is Death itself.

In that collection, or rather in that great book, in which Death,
playing his part on every page, is the connecting link and the dominant
thought, Holbein has marshalled sovereigns, pontiffs, lovers, gamblers,