hurrying to offer her breast to the new-born
(in accordance with the beautiful custom still in force in Provence)
that its own mother may rest a little before she begins to suckle it; or
that of the other mother bringing the cradle of which her own baby has
been dispossessed, because of her compassion for the poor woman at the
inn whose child is lying on a truss of straw.

But the popular additions, begotten of association of ideas, are far
more numerous and also are far more curious. The hill-top, close under
the floating figure of Jehovah, has been crowned with a
wind-mill--because wind-mills abounded anciently on the hill-tops of
Provence. To the mill, naturally, has been added a miller--who is riding
down the road on an ass, with a sack of flour across his saddle-bow
that he is carrying as a gift to the Holy Family. The adoring shepherds
have been given flocks of sheep, and on the hill-side more shepherds and
more sheep have been put for company. The sheep, in association with the
ox and the ass, have brought in their train a whole troop of domestic
animals--including geese and turkeys and chickens and a cock on the roof
of the stable; and in the train of the camels has come the extraordinary
addition of lions, bears, leopards, elephants, ostriches, and even
crocodiles! The Provencaux being from of old mighty hunters (the
tradition has found its classic embodiment in Tartarin), and hill-sides
being appropriate to hunting, a figure of a fowler with a gun at his
shoulder has been introduced; and as it is well, even in the case of a
Provencal sportsman, to point a gun at a definite object, the fowler
usually is so placed as to aim at the cock on the stable roof. He is a
modern, yet not very recent addition, the fowler, as is shown by the
fact that he carries a flint-lock fowling-piece. Drumming and fifing
being absolute essentials to every sort of Provencal festivity, a
conspicuous figure always is found playing on a _tambourin_ and
_galoubet_. Itinerant knife-grinders are an old institution here, and in
some obscure way--possibly because of their thievish propensities--are
associated intimately with the devil; and so there is either a
knife-grinder simple, or a devil with a knife-grinder's wheel. Of old it
was the custom for the women to carry distaffs and to spin out thread as
they went to and from the fields or along the roads (just as the women
nowadays knit as they walk), and therefore a spinning-woman always is of