or a long time. It was a Saturday,
towards the end of autumn. The heavy gray clouds were being driven
rapidly through the sky by the gusts of wind which whistled among the
trees, and one felt that it would rain soon. The country was deserted at
that time of the evening, and on the eve of Sunday. Here and there in
the fields there rose up stacks of thrashed out corn, like huge yellow
mushrooms, and the fields looked bare, as they had already been sown for
the next year.

Randel was hungry, with the hunger of some wild animal, such a hunger as
drives wolves to attack men. Worn out and weakened with fatigue, he took
longer strides, so as not to take so many steps, and with heavy head,
the blood throbbing in his temples, with red eyes and dry mouth, he
grasped his stick tightly in his hand, with a longing to strike the
first passer-by whom he should meet, and who might be going home to
supper, with all his force.

He looked at the sides of the road with the image of potatoes dug up and
lying on the ground before his eyes; if he had found any, he would have
gathered some dead wood, made a fire in the ditch, and have had a
capital supper off the warm, round vegetables, which he would first of
all have held burning hot, in his cold hands. But it was too late in the
year, and he would have to gnaw a raw beetroot, as he had done the day
before, which he picked up in a field.

For the last two days he had spoken aloud as he quickened his steps,
under the influence of his thoughts. He had never thought, hitherto, as
he had given all his mind, all his simple faculties, to his industrial
requirements. But now, fatigue, and this desperate search for work which
he could not get, refusals and rebuffs, nights spent in the open-air,
lying on the grass, long fasting, the contempt which he knew people with
a settled abode felt for a vagabond, and that question which he was
continually asked: "Why do you not remain at home?" Now, distress at not
being able to use his strong arms which he felt so full of vigor, the
recollection of his relations who had remained at home and who also had
not a half-penny, filled him by degrees with rage, which had been
accumulating every day, every hour, every minute, and which now escaped
his lips in spite of himself in short growling sentences.

As he stumbled over the stones which rolled beneath his bare feet, he
grumbled, "How wretched! how miserable!... A set of hogs ... to let a
man die of hunger ...