supple finish of one whose life has not been set upon level roads. At a
speculative distance he appeared a straight specimen of a Burgundian
youth--sinewy, clean-formed, and graceful, though slender to gauntness;
and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul die
out of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself into
some accident of twisted branches as one approaches the billowing tree
that presented it.

The soul of Camille, the idiot, had warped long after its earthly
tabernacle had grown firm and fair to look upon. Cause and effect were
not one from birth in him; and the result was a most wistful expression,
as though the lost intellect were for ever struggling and failing to
recall its ancient mastery. Mostly he was a gentle young man, noteworthy
for nothing but the uncomplaining patience with which he daily observed
the monotonous routine of simple duties that were now all-sufficient for
the poor life that had "crept so long on a broken wing." He milked the
big, red, barrel-bodied cow, and churned industriously for butter; he
kept the little vegetable garden in order and nursed the Savoys into
fatness like plumping babies; he drove the goats to pasture on the
mountain slopes, and all day sat among the rhododendrons, the forgotten
soul behind his eyes conning the dead language of fate, as a foreigner
vainly interrogates the abstruse complexity of an idiom.

By-and-by I made it an irregular habit to accompany him on these
shepherdings; to join him in his simple midday meal of sour brown bread
and goat-milk cheese; to talk with him desultorily, and study him the
while, inasmuch as he wakened an interest in me that was full of
speculation. For his was not an imbecility either hereditary or
constitutional. From the first there had appeared to me something
abnormal in it--a suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in the