town, to ask the group of children who stood before him for M.
Benassis' house. At first the children looked at each other, then they
scrutinized the stranger with the expression that they usually wear
when they set eyes upon anything for the first time; a different
curiosity and a different thought in every little face. Then the
boldest and the merriest of the band, a little bright-eyed urchin,
with bare, muddy feet, repeated his words over again, in child
fashion.

"M. Benassis' house, sir?" adding, "I will show you the way there."

He walked along in front of the horse, prompted quite as much by a
wish to gain a kind of importance by being in the stranger's company,
as by a child's love of being useful, or the imperative craving to be
doing something, that possesses mind and body at his age. The officer
followed him for the entire length of the principal street of the
country town. The way was paved with cobblestones, and wound in and
out among the houses, which their owners had erected along its course
in the most arbitrary fashion. In one place a bake-house had been
built out into the middle of the roadway; in another a gable
protruded, partially obstructing the passage, and yet farther on a
mountain stream flowed across it in a runnel. Genestas noticed a fair
number of roofs of tarred shingle, but yet more of them were thatched;
a few were tiled, and some seven or eight (belonging no doubt to the
cure, the justice of the peace, and some of the wealthier townsmen)
were covered with slates. There was a total absence of regard for
appearances befitting a village at the end of the world, which had
nothing beyond it, and no connection with any other place. The people
who lived in it seemed to belong to one family that dwelt beyond the
limits of the bustling world, with which the collector of taxes and a