he suspected that there must be some mystery in this life of
obscurity, and said to himself as he looked at the remarkable face
before him:

"How comes it that he is still a country doctor?"

When he had made a careful study of this countenance, that, in spite
of its resemblance to other human faces, revealed an inner life nowise
in harmony with a commonplace exterior, he could not help sharing the
doctor's interest in his patient; and the sight of that patient
completely changed the current of his thoughts.

Much as the old cavalry officer had seen in the course of his
soldier's career, he felt a thrill of surprise and horror at the sight
of a human face which could never have been lighted up with thought--a
livid face in which a look of dumb suffering showed so plainly--the
same look that is sometimes worn by a child too young to speak, and
too weak to cry any longer; in short, it was the wholly animal face of
an old dying cretin. The cretin was the one variety of the human
species with which the commandant had not yet come in contact. At the
sight of the deep, circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden,
fish-like eyes, and the head, with its short, coarse, scantily-growing
hair--a head utterly divested of all the faculties of the senses--who
would not have experienced, as Genestas did, an instinctive feeling of
repulsion for a being that had neither the physical beauty of an
animal nor the mental endowments of man, who was possessed of neither
instinct nor reason, and who had never heard nor spoken any kind of
articulate speech? It seemed difficult to expend any regrets over the
poor wretch now visibly drawing towards the very end of an existence
which had not been life in any sense of the word; yet the old woman