dialect of her native country rose to her lips, and in her own patois she
inveighed against the deceased:

"Ah! the bad man, the mean man! Didn't I tell him, time and again, that
he would leave us in trouble! Where can we seek our bread this late in
the day? We shall have to beg in the streets!"

"Hush! hush! mother," interrupted Claudet, sternly, placing his hand on
her shoulder, "it does not mend matters to give way like that. Calm
thyself--so long as I have hands on the ends of my arms, we never shall
be beggars. But I must go out--I need air."

And crossing the gardens rapidly, he soon reached the outskirts of the
brambly thicket.

This landscape, both rugged and smiling in its wildness, hardly conveyed
the idea of silence, but rather of profound meditation, absolute calm;
the calmness of solitude, the religious meditation induced by spacious
forest depths. The woods seemed asleep, and the low murmurings, which
from time to time escaped from their recesses, seemed like the
unconscious sighs exhaled by a dreamer. The very odor peculiar to trees
in autumn, the penetrating and spicy odor of the dying leaves, had a
delicate and subtle aroma harmonizing with this quietude of fairyland.

Now and then, through the vaporous golden atmosphere of the late autumn
sunset, through the pensive stillness of the hushed woods, the distant
sound of feminine voices, calling to one another, echoed from the hills,
and beyond the hedges was heard the crackling of branches, snapped by
invisible hands, and the rattle of nuts dropping on the earth. It was
the noise made by the gatherers of beechnuts, for in the years when the