ould let the boy fall to the bottom.
When his head appeared over the brink, I asked:

"'What is it?' as though I only expected that he would tell me what he
had discovered at the bottom.

"We both got on to the stone slab at the edge of the well, and, face to
face, hoisted the body.

"Mother Lecacheur and Celeste watched us from a distance, concealed
behind the wall of the house. When they saw, issuing from the well, the
black slippers and white stockings of the drowned person, they
disappeared.

"Sapeur seized the ankles of the poor chaste woman, and we drew it up,
inclined, as it was, in the most immodest posture. The head was in a
shocking state, bruised and black; and the long, gray hair, hanging
down, was tangled and disordered.

"'In the name of all that is holy, how lean she is!' exclaimed Sapeur,
in a contemptuous tone.

"We carried her into the room, and as the women did not put in an
appearance, I, with the assistance of the lad, dressed the corpse for
burial.

"I washed her disfigured face. By the touch of my hand an eye was
slightly opened; it seemed to scan me with that pale stare, with that
cold, that terrible look which corpses have, a look which seems to come
from the beyond. I plaited up, as well as I could, her disheveled hair,
and I adjusted on her forehead a novel and singularly formed lock. Then
I took off her dripping wet garments, baring, not without a feeling of
shame, as though I had been guilty of some profanation, her shoulders
and her chest, and her long arms, slim as the twigs of branches.

"I next went to fetch some flowers, corn poppies, blue beetles,
marguerites, and fresh and perfumed herbs, with which to strew her
funeral couch.

"Being the only person near her, it was necessary for me to perform the
usual ceremonies. In a letter found in her pocket, written at the last
moment, she asked that her body be buried in the village in which she
had passed the last days of her life. A frightful thought then
oppressed my heart. Was it not on my account that she wished to be laid
at rest in this place?

"Toward the evening, all the female gossips of the locality came to
view the remains of the defunct; but I would not allow a single person
to enter; I wanted to be alone; and I watched by the corpse the whole
night.

"By the flickering light of the candles, I looked at the body of this
miserable woman, wholly unknown, who had died so lamentably and so far
away from home. Had she l