the German trains left the station without whistling; he was speaking of some important terminus. 66 reflogged the pup so callously that for half an hour afterwards it lay on the ground incapable of movement, after which it crawled to some dark hole to wonder what had happened, for no attempt had been made to connect crime "But I tell you," he added proudly, we soon altered that. We had a fine racket going in no time. Why, it wasn't like a proper railway-station and punishment in the anibefore." Correction, when when it does come, however, is handed out only too generously, almost in a Sodom and Gomorrah fashion. Little Faust, having lived for some three months picking up all his mother's bad habits, acquiring one or two of his own, suddenly the other day transgressed the limits. It happened that the wife of the blacksmith, a pessimistic woman, had turned loose a bevy of young ducks into the road. Little Faust, with no education, saw these rolling peeping things-reetous, they call 'em locally-as playthings loosed for his benefit. He cornered one in a filthy yard protected from the street by a gate of iron grille, and here in safety he proceeded to test the virtues of his needle teeth. The shrieks of the blacksmith's wife called Raymond on to the scene; the duckling was rescued. Faust then was taught. Raymond, of course, lost his temper, and we had literally to drag him from the puppy, which could just creep away. But the animal's trials were not yet over, for Monsieur Soltress, a very kind-hearted man in general, coming on the scene, and learning of the enormity, mal's consciousness. The blacksmith's wife, mourning over its sad fate, held in her hand the injured duckling; it was but a week or so old, and looked, to all intents and purposes, dead. The head hung down, the legs were up, the eyes were hidden by ghastly leaden-coloured lids. And then in a tearful voice the woman began to re-explain the tragedy to us. "He squeezed it thus," exclaimed the blacksmith's wife, forgetting herself in the energy of her interpretations, and squeezing the unfortunate duckling till one could almost hear its bones crack. "It was too dreadful. He shook it so," she cried pitifully, jerking the unconscious animal to and fro with a vicious movement. Whatever it had suffered from little Faust it suffered over again in the blacksmith's wife's too poignant illustrations. Then having done her best to extinguish what sparks of life yet remained, she gave it a dose of strong coffee and hoped for the best. Marvellous to tell, both the duckling and little Faust survived. The other day Monsieur Soltress propounded this question to me, "Why is it in the nature of the dog to snap at and bite human beings?" which sufficiently illustrates the attitude of dog to man or rather of man to dog in these lands, for the dog is but what man makes him. Indeed, it is unpleasant to go for country walks, since at every turn one is greeted by some yapping snarling cur which renders the air clamorous with his obscene barkings. The dogs of the village, too, are the weirdest assortment of mongrels that it has ever been my fate to see, and once more Monsieur Soltress asked, " Have you got dogs like these in England?" Had I spoken truthfully, I would have retorted, "In England a set of dogs like this would be hurried off to the lethal chamber at once." But he could not have understood. Cows merely for milk, and dogs for courage and race, lie beyond the gropings of his not unintelligent peasant mind. In the French country, dogs are kept to yap, and anything on four legs with a yap will serve. But we must not blame the peasant, especially the Southern peasant, because he loves not cats and dogs. The active love of animals is a late development of civilisation. Less than a hundred years ago England tolerated slavery. Janac in almost every way is as the Revolution left it: it has electric light, often dim either for lack or surfeit of water; it has an electric bread-mixer to save the brawny arms of CouCou; it has a steam threshing machine; it has breech-loading shot-guns with which to massacre the red-legged partridge and the sauvage rabbit, but in most other respects it is eighteenth or even seventeenth century. Besides, it is difficult to love dogs and cats in a land where inevitably they are swarming with fleas; the most tender, already active sentiment here hesitates to express itself, so how is sentiment yet unawakened to arise in the face of so lively a deterrent? The dogs here certainly have no leisure to "brood over being dogs," as David Harum says. There is one donkey which Kissme hates as sincerely as Miss Trotwood hated the whole species; it is a large and solemn animal named Tambour, about as big as a mule, a giant of a donkey. Tambour, rated by Kissme for some unaccountable reason, is well treated, but not appreciated by his owners, who keep the village shop. These people, with the baker, the blacksmith, and the shoemaker St Amoux do not confound the latter with the épicier-cobbler,-are the only tradesmen in the village whom one should not call amateur tradesmen-that is, they are the only people who live and expect to make money by their trades. Contrast with them, for instance, the tobacconist: he is tobacconist and cooper, his daughter makes hats, his mother babies' underlinen; he has four pieces of land dotted about the country, a chestnut wood, two pieces ness that they meditate selling of wild land for brushwood, it and making a raid on the and a garden; moreover, he capital. owns his house. He is in reality farmer, gardener, viner, forester, chestnut merchant, cooper, modiste, lingère, and tobacconist, but the only thing which really interests him is fishing. Occasionally he has a little gamble in plums or walnuts for the English market. So one can hardly call coopering nor yet tobacconist his real trade. The owner of Tambour has a real shop-that is to say, lives by it; St Amoux has a real shop, a bootmaker's, for all that he is a direct descendant of those old seigneurs who lorded it over Janac till the period when Tuk-Tuk's house was built. Poor Tambour, however, is unappreciated. His master considers the donkey as a blot on his escutcheon. The man was once a policeman, and his dignity would feel itself fitted with nothing less than a horse, though Tambour does twice the work a horse of his value could perform. But ambition stifles dignity. Tambour is kept because these people have greater dreams yet. They have their eyes on Paris-Paris, which sucks the best blood from the villages, which takes the rough peasant, in one generation turning him into a bon bourgeois, in two transforming the roughhewn stock of the soil into the courteous doctor or the smooth-tongued avocat. Tambour's owners have done so well by sticking to one busi The ducks of Madame Soltress, having enjoyed during the hot morning the delights of their fabricated pool, and having practically emptied it of water, are now quacking loudly for their food. They know and love Madame Soltress, while she has an equal affection for them, though I fear it is but cupboard love on both sides. But for her side of the matter Madame Soltress shows an aspect of humanity which never fails to puzzle me. The chief nourishment for ducks in Janac consists of nettleleaves, chopped up finely. Every morning for three months at least Madame Soltress has sought for, gathered, and chopped up nettles, nor is she the only one; the tobacconist's daughter chops nettles as does the blacksmith's wife. These people go hunting the nettle, has each her secret spots where the vegetable grows thickly. Every duck in the village represents at least three months of stung and swollen hands, for, of course, the peasant would not deign to wear gloves. Well, balancing up the pain of nettlecutting against the joys of duck-eating, I confess that nine dinners of duck would not compensate me for a hundred days of nettle-stung hands; and in like manner it so often appears to me that a full two-thirds of the pleasures after which humanity scrambles do little to balance the labour and pains of providing the means of that basse-cour is the basement enjoyment. from which animal effluvia penetrates the whole house. Courtesy makes the old woman try to drive her pigs to a distance sufficient not to nauseate us. She, having no prejudices or objections to animal smells of any sort, has the delicacy to respect our idiosyncrasy, though she does not understand it. Her old husband is not so intelligent, or maybe he is chauvinistic. We dread the days when 'tis he who lets. the pigs out. And now at last, prolonged sufficiently to overshadow the whole of our meal, as we are eating our cantaloup melon, that Sphinx of a door is opened. That door in the sideways edge of Tuk-Tuk's owner's house, which maybe you have forgotten. A little old woman with a long switch descends the steps, a huge key is turned, she shrills in a cracked voice, "Ven, ven, ven," bearing aloft as temptation two cobs of Indian corn richly pearled with golden grains. Staggering up the steps clamber a pair of huge pigs looking like-coming events casting shadows before -badly made raw sausages. The old woman shrieks Ven, ven!" switching them lustily with her rod. The pigs race down the road, out of noseshot, thank heavens. We sigh with relief, the pigs having been turned out for exactly the same reason as Tasso, the lady's lapdog, is run at night in the garden. Most of the village pigs are thus housetrained; each is given its daily airing. We are accustomed to think of the basse-cour as the farmyard, but in these villages of peasant proprietorship every house has its basse-cour, and Anyway, the villagers think that we are a queer couple. They cannot fathom our interest in animals. Why have we taught Tuk-Tuk to leap for morsels; why have we taught Kissme the meaning of down," Kissme who has never learned a thing in nine years except that when one heavy bump resounds from the kitchen Madame Soltress is probably trimming meat and there may be scraps to pick up, whereas repeated bumps indicate that she is mincing herbs or stuffing, which has no profit for a dog? We have, through the animals, discovered a host of things about the French village, but to the villagers it is all a part of the madness of the English. (Later.) The vines are now approaching ripeness. Over our heads the acacias are yellowing, and their falling leaves seem II. to be less palatable to the fowls and ducks. Our own moment for leaving the hospitable country is nearing, and I am pro longing our stay but for one reason, to see the country winemaking. In the cellar of the Soltress's is a deep vat of cement, which is soon to be filled with grapes. Into this, probably without alteration of technique since the days of Abraham, M. Soltress will descend and, stripped naked, will wallow in grape-juice, pressing out vintage with expert toes, while near at hand, Madame Soltress, all a-twitter of anxiety, and Raymond the son will hold a life-line attached to the proprietor's waist for safety in the event of an excess of carbonic acid gas. They tell us that several persons per annum are asphyxiated in the local winemakings through lack of caution, drowned like the English prince, if not in Malmsey, in vintages of Burgundy, Touraine, or Bordeaux. We are dining-soupe, cabbage farcie, new flageolet beans, and chicken, of which last Jo is preserving on the edge of her plate several delectable morsels for Tuk-Tuk. To-day he will leap at least four feet. But no Tuk-Tuk appears. Now and then he is thus absent, sometimes seduced to the lower streets in search of oddments, sometimes shut up in the henhouse with the rabbits. Madame Soltress comes to change our plates. "What a pity Tuk-Tuk is not here," says my wife; "I had saved some especial bits for him." VOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCXCIX. E |