ts of the neighborhood. They have talked so much about
ghosts, and they know so well all the tricks of which these malicious
spirits are capable, that they fear them scarcely at all. It is
especially at night that all of them--grave-diggers, hemp-dressers, and
ghosts--do their work. It is also at night when the hemp-dresser tells
his melancholy stories. Permit me to make a digression.

When the hemp has reached the right stage, that is to say, when it has
been steeped sufficiently in running water, and half dried on the bank,
it is brought into the yard and arranged in little upright sheaves,
which, with their stalks divided at the base, and their heads bound in
balls, bear in the dusk some small resemblance to a long procession
of little white phantoms, standing on their slender legs, and moving
noiselessly along the wall.

It is at the end of September, when the nights are still warm, that they
begin to beat it by the pale light of the moon. By day the hemp has been
heated in the oven; at night they take it out to beat it while it is
still hot. For this they use a kind of horse surmounted by a wooden
lever which falls into grooves and breaks the plant without cutting it.
It is then that you hear in the night that sudden, sharp noise of three
blows in quick succession. Then there is silence; it is the movement of
the arm drawing out the handful of hemp to break it in a fresh spot. The
three blows begin again; the other arm works the lever, and thus it goes
on until the moon is hidden by the early streaks of dawn. As the work
continues but a few days in the year, the dogs are not accustomed to it,
and yelp their plaintive howls toward every point of the horizon.

It is the time of unwonted and mysterious sounds in the country. The
migrating cranes fly so high that by day they are scarcely visible. By
night they are only heard, and their hoarse wailing voices, lost in the
clouds, sound like the parting cry of souls in torment, striving to find
the road to heaven, yet forced by an unconquerable fate to wander near
the earth about the haunts of men; for these errant birds have strange
uncertainties, and many a mysterious anxiety in the course of their airy
flight. Sometimes they lose the wind when the capricious gusts battle,
or come and go in the upper regions. When this confusion comes by day,
you can see the leader of the file fluttering aimlessly in the air, then
turn about and take his place at the tail of the triang