I am waiting for a man who has undertaken to show me some caverns in the
neighbouring rocks. Meanwhile, another comes along, and makes mysterious
signs to me from the road. He is barefoot and ragged, and does not look as
if he had a taste for regular work, but rather as if he belonged to the
somewhat numerous class who live by expedients, and have representatives in
all ranks of society. He has a small sack in his hand, to which he points
while he addresses me in patois. I tell him to come in. The sack contains
crayfish, and now I know the reason of his mysterious air, for all
fishing is prohibited at this time, and he is running the gauntlet of the
_garde-peche_, who lives close by. The poor ragamuffin has been out all
night, wading in the streams, and his wife, who looks, if possible, more
eager and hungry than himself, is waiting near, keeping watch. He offers
his crayfish for three sous the dozen, and I buy them of him without
feeling that respect for the law and the spawning season which I know I
ought to have. But I have suffered a good deal from bad example. There was
a _Procureur de la Republique_ not far from here the other day, and the
first thing he asked for at the hotel was fish.

Presently the other man--the one I am waiting for--shows himself. He is
a lean old soldier of the Empire, with a white moustache, kept short and
stiff like a nailbrush. He is still active, and if he has any disease he is
in happy ignorance of it; nevertheless, he confides to me that it is in
the legs that he begins to feel his seventy-two years. His face has a very
startling appearance. It is so scratched and torn that it makes me think of
the man of the nursery-rhyme who jumped into the quickset-hedge; and, as
it turns out, this one was just such another, only his movement was
involuntary. He tells me how he came to be so disfigured. He was coming
home with some cronies, at a late hour, from one of those Friendly Society
meetings which in France, as in England, move the bottle as well as the