tin flasks.

The appearance among them of old Madame Degardy shifted the good-natured
attack. For many a year, winter and summer, she had come and gone in the
parish, all rags and tatters, wearing men's kneeboots and cap, her grey
hair hanging down in straggling curls, her lower lip thrust out fiercely,
her quick eyes wandering to and fro, and her sharp tongue, like Parpon's,
clearing a path before her whichever way she turned. On her arm she
carried a little basket of cakes and confitures, and these she dreamed
she sold, for they were few who bought of Crazy Joan. The stout stick
she carried was as compelling as her tongue, so that when the river-men
surrounded her in amiable derision, it was used freely and with a heart
all kindness: "For the good of their souls," she said, "since the Cure
was too mild, Mary in heaven bless him high and low!"

She was the Cure's champion everywhere, and he in turn was tender towards
the homeless body, whose history even to him was obscure, save in the few
particulars that he had given to Valmond the last time they had met.

In her youth Madame Degardy was pretty and much admired. Her lover had
deserted her, and in a fit of mad indignation and despair she had fled
from the village, and vanished no one knew where, though it had been
declared by a wandering hunter that she had been seen in the far-off
hills that march into the south, and that she lived there with a
barbarous mountaineer, who had himself long been an outlaw from his kind.

But this had been mere gossip, and after twenty-five years she came back
to Pontiac, a half-mad creature, and took up the thread of her life
alone; and Parpon and the Cure saw that she suffered nothing in the hard
winters.