All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand,
shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached
them, and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:

"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What a
foolish fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of
the ground, as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you
knew so little as that."

Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there
what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated
in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we
call the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast
appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and
local,--a peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language to
another.

Jean the hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder of
good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling
grotesquely between the points of his lifted and distorted
shoulders, like a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken
tree. He was bellicose in his amiable way and never knew just when
to acknowledge defeat. How long he might have kept up the hopeless
struggle with the girl's invincible grip would be hard to guess.
His release was caused by the approach of a third person, who wore
the robe of a Catholic priest and the countenance of a man who had
lived and suffered a long time without much loss of physical
strength and endurance.

This was Pere Beret, grizzly, short, compact, his face deeply