hundred and odd feet), aye," he added self-complacently, "and I have a
little money besides."

"Yet you live here all by yourself and still work for wages?" I asked.
His reply was eminently characteristic. "I work for my children." These
children he told me were two grown up sons, one of them being like
himself a gardener, both having work. Thus in order to hoard up a little
more for two able-bodied young men, here was a bent, aged man living
penuriously and alone, his only companion being a beautiful and
evidently much petted donkey. I ventured to express an English view of
the matter, namely, the undesirability of encouraging idleness and
self-indulgence in one's children by toiling and moiling for them in old
age.

He nodded his head.

"You are right, all that you say is true, but so it is with me. I must
work for my children."

And thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola,
Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and with
which we are familiarized in French criminal reports--parents and
grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings.

Thus also are generated in the rich and leisured classes that intense
selfishness of the rising generation so movingly portrayed in M.
Hervieu's play, "La Course du Flambeau." No one who has witnessed Mme.
Rejane's presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever
forget it.