of the mountain toward
Montegnac, and ought therefore to send their waters down there, do not
do so, neither in regular water-courses nor in sudden torrents after
rains and the melting of the snows."

"Ah, madame," said Farrabesche, "the rector, who thinks all the time
about the welfare of Montegnac, has guessed the reason, but he can't
find any proof of it. Since your arrival, he has made me trace the path
of the water from point to point through each ravine and valley. I was
returning yesterday, when I had the honor of meeting you, from the
base of the Roche-Vive, where I carefully examined the lay of the land.
Hearing the horses' feet, I came up to see who was there. Monsieur
Bonnet is not only a saint, madame; he is a man of great knowledge.
'Farrabesche,' he said to me (I was then working on the road the village
has just built to the chateau, and the rector came to me and pointed to
that chain of hills from Montegnac to Roche-Vive),--'Farrabesche,' he
said, 'there must be some reason why that water-shed does not send any
of its water to the plain; Nature must have made some sluiceway which
carries it elsewhere.' Well, madame, that idea is so simple you would
suppose any child might have thought it; yet no one since Montegnac
existed, neither the great lords, nor their bailiffs, nor their
foresters, nor the poor, nor the rich, none of those who saw that plain
barren for want of water, ever asked themselves why the streams which
now feed the Gabou do not come there. The three districts above, which
have constantly been afflicted with fevers in consequence of stagnant
water, never looked for the remedy; I myself, who live in the wilds,
never dreamed of it; it needed a man of God."

The tears filled his eyes as he said the word.

"All that men of genius discover," said Madame Graslin, "seems so simple
that every one thinks they might have discovered it themselves. But,"
she added, as if to herself, "genius has this fine thing about it,--it
resembles all the world, but no one resembles it."

"I understood Monsieur Bonnet at once," continued Farrabesche; "it did
not take him many words to tell me what I had to do. Madame, this fact
I tell you of is all the more singular because there are, toward the
plain, great rents and fissures in the mountain, gorges and ravines down
which the water flows; but, strange to say, these clefts and ravines and
gorges all send their streams into a little valley which is several feet
be