both. They were people of the soil, whose quarrel with the
alphabet was so great that they had never opened a book in their
lives; and they kept a lean farm on the cold granite ridge of the
Rouergue tableland. The house, standing alone among the heath and
broom, with no neighbor for many a mile around and visited at
intervals by the wolves, was to them the hub of the universe. But
for a few surrounding villages, whither the calves were driven on
fair days, the rest was only very vaguely known by hearsay. In
this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their quagmires oozing
with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the principal source of
wealth, with rich, wet grass. In summer, on the short swards of
the slopes, the sheep were penned day and night, protected from
beasts of prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with pitchforks.
When the grass was cropped close at one spot, the fold was shifted
elsewhere. In the center was the shepherd's rolling hut, a straw
cabin. Two watchdogs, equipped with spiked collars, were
answerable for tranquillity if the thieving wolf appeared in the
night from out the neighboring woods.

Padded with a perpetual layer of cow dung, in which I sank to my
knees, broken up with shimmering puddles of dark brown liquid
manure, the farmyard also boasted a numerous population. Here the
lambs skipped, the geese trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground
and the sow grunted with her swarm of little pigs hanging to her
dugs.

The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same
chances. In a propitious season, they would set fire to a stretch
of moorland bristling with gorse and send the swing plow across the
ground enriched with the cinders of the blaze. This yielded a few