acres of rye, oats and potatoes. The best corners were kept for
hemp, which furnished the distaffs and spindles of the house with
the material for linen and was looked upon as grandmother's private
crop.

Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in
matters of cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else.
How dumbfounded he would have been to learn that, in the remote
future, one of his family would become enamoured of those
insignificant animals to which he had never vouchsafed a glance in
his life! Had he guessed that that lunatic was myself, the
scapegrace seated at the table by his side, what a smack I should
have caught in the neck, what a wrathful look!

"The idea of wasting one's time with that nonsense!" he would have
thundered.

For the patriarch was not given to joking. I can still see his
serious face, his unclipped head of hair, often brought back behind
his ears with a flick of the thumb and spreading its ancient Gallic
mane over his shoulders. I see his little three-cornered hat, his
small clothes buckled at the knees, his wooden shoes, stuffed with
straw, that echoed as he walked. Ah, no! Once childhood's games
were past, it would never have done to rear the Grasshopper and
unearth the Dung beetle from his natural surroundings.

Grandmother, pious soul, used to wear the eccentric headdress of
the Rouergue highlanders: a large disk of black felt, stiff as a
plank, adorned in the middle with a crown a finger's breadth high
and hardly wider across than a six franc piece. A black ribbon