ey esteemed as a high privilege their
opportunity thus to penetrate into the very arcana of high culinary art.
The Vidame even said that Nanoun's matrimonial chances--already good,
for the baggage had set half the lads of the country-side at loggerheads
about her--would be decidedly bettered by this discipline under Mise
Fougueiroun: whose name long has been one to conjure with in all the
kitchens between Saint-Remy and the Rhone. For the Provencaux are
famous trencher-men, and the way that leads through their gullets is not
the longest way to their hearts.

VI

But in spite of their eager natural love for all good things eatable,
the Provencaux also are poets; and, along with the cooking, another
matter was in train that was wholly of a poetic cast. This was the
making of the creche: a representation with odd little figures and
accessories of the personages and scene of the Nativity--the whole at
once so naive and so tender as to be possible only among a people
blessed with rare sweetness and rare simplicity of soul.

The making of the creche is especially the children's part of the
festival--though the elders always take a most lively interest in
it--and a couple of days before Christmas, as we were returning from one
of our walks, we fell in with all the farm children coming homeward from
the mountains laden with creche-making material: mosses, lichens,
laurel, and holly; this last of smaller growth than our holly, but
bearing fine red berries, which in Provencal are called _li poumeto de
Sant-Jan_--"the little apples of Saint John."

Our expedition had been one of the many that the Vidame took me upon in
order that he might expound his geographical reasons for believing in
his beloved Roman Camp; and this diversion enabled me to escape from
Marius--I fear with a somewhat unseemly precipitation--by pressing him
for information in regard to the matter which the children had in hand.
As to openly checking the Vidame, when once he fairly is astride of his
hobby, the case is hopeless. To cast a doubt upon even the least of his
declarations touching the doings of the Roman General is the signal for
a blaze of arguments down all his battle front; and I really do not like
even to speculate upon what might happen were I to meet one of his major
propositions with a flat denial! But an attack in flank, I find--the
sudden posing of a question upon some minor antiquarian theme--usually
can be counted upon, as in this insta