over yonder.

"I bought him and his furniture out. I said to myself, 'I'll buy it for
eight hundred, and I'll sell it for four hundred, in a year.'" Here he
laid his finger on his nose--lengthwise, the Norman in him supplanting
the priest in his remembrance of a good bargain. "And now it is twenty
years since then. Everything creaks and cracks over there: all of us
creak and crack. You should hear my chairs, _elles se cassent les
reins_--they break their thighs continually. Ah! there goes another, I
cry out, as I sit down in one in winter and hear them groan. Poor old
things, they are of the Empire, no wonder they groan. You should see
us, when our brethren come to take a cup of soup with me. Such a
collection of antiquities as we are! I catch them, my brothers, looking
about, slyly peering into the secrets of my little menage. 'From his
ancestors, doubtless, these old chairs and tables, say these good
freres, under their breath. And then I wink slyly at the chairs, and
they never let on."

Again the mellow laugh broke forth. He stopped again to puff and blow a
little, from his toil up the steep steps. Then all at once, as the
rough music of his clicking sabots and the playful taps of his cane
ceased, the laugh on his mobile lips melted into seriousness. He lifted
his cane, pointing to the cemetery just above us, and to the
gravestones looking down over the hillsides between a network of roses.

"We are old, madame--we are old, but, alas! we never die! It is
difficult to people, that cemetery. There are only sixty of us in the
parish, and we die--we die hard. For example, here is my old
servant"--and he covered a grave with a sweep of his cane--for we were
leisurely sauntering through the little cemetery now. The grave to