a carpenter ... a set of hogs ... not two
pence ... not two pence ... and now it is raining ... a set of hogs!..."

He was indignant at the injustice of fate, and cast the blame on men, on
all men, because nature, that great, blind mother, is unjust, cruel and
perfidious, and he repeated through his clenched teeth: "A set of hogs,"
as he looked at the thin gray smoke which rose from the roofs, for it
was the dinner hour. And without thinking about that other injustice,
which is human, and which is called robbery and violence, he felt
inclined to go into one of those houses to murder the inhabitants, and
to sit down to table, in their stead.

He said to himself: "I have a right to live, now ... as they are letting
me die of hunger ... and yet I only ask for work ... a set of hogs!" And
the pain in his limbs, the gnawing in his heart rose to his head like
terrible intoxication, and gave rise to this simple thought in his
brain: "I have the right to live because I breathe, and because the air
is the common property of everybody, and so nobody has a right to leave
me without bread!"

A fine, thick, icy cold rain was coming down and he stopped and
murmured: "How miserable!... another month of walking before I get
home...." He was indeed returning home then; for he saw that he should
more easily find work in his native town where he was known,--and he did
not mind what he did,--than on the high roads, where everybody suspected
him. As the carpentering business was not going well he would turn
day-laborer, be a mason's hodman, ditcher, break stones on the road. If
he only earned tenpence a day, that would at any rate find him something
to eat.

He tied the remains of his last pocket handkerchief round his neck, to
prevent the cold water from running down his back and chest; but he soon
found that it was penetrating the thin material of which his clothes
were made, and he glanced round him with the agonized look of a man who
does not know where to hide his body and to rest his head, and has no
place of shelter in the whole world.

Night came on, and wrapped the country in obscurity, and in the
distance, in a meadow, he saw a dark spot on the grass; it was a cow,
and so he got over the ditch by the roadside and went up to her, without
exactly knowing what he was doing. When he got close to her, she raised
her great head to him, and he thought: "If I only had a jug, I could get
a little milk." He looked at the cow, and the