lities--all things are reduced to their proper size. Houses,
barns and the skeletons of leafless trees stand out, naked facts in the
landscape. The orchards are soggy in mud and the once green feathery
lane back of my house abandoned, is now a rough gash of frozen pools and
rotten leaves.

Birds twitter in the thin hedges.

I would never have believed my wild garden, once so full of mystery--gay
flowers, sunshine and droning bees, to be so modest in size. A few
rectangles of bare, frozen ground, and a clinging vine trembling against
the old wall, is all that remains, save the scraggly little fruit trees
green with moss. Beyond, in a haze of chill sea mist, lie the
woodlands, long undulating ribbons of gray twigs crouching under a
leaden sky.

In the cavernous cider press whose doors creak open within my courtyard
Pere Bordier and a boy in eartabs, are busy making cider. If you stop
and listen you can hear the cider trickling into the cask and Pere
Bordier encouraging the patient horse who circles round and round a
great stone trough in which revolve two juggernauts of wooden wheels.
The place reeks with the ooze and drip of crushed apples. The giant
screw of oak, the massive beams, seen dimly in the gloomy light that
filters through a small barred window cut through the massive stone
wall, gives the old pressoir the appearance of some feudal torture
chamber. Blood ran once, and people shrieked in such places--as these.

* * * * *

To-morrow begins the new year and every peasant girl's cheeks are
scrubbed bright and her hair neatly dressed, for to-morrow all France
embraces--so the cheeks are rosy in readiness.

"_Tiens_, mademoiselle!" exclaims the butcher's boy clattering into my
kitchen in his sabots.

_Eh, voila!_ My good little maid-of-all-work, Suzette, has been kissed
by the butcher's boy and a moment later by Pere Bordier, who has left
the cider press for a steaming bowl of _cafe au lait_; and ten minutes
later by the Mere Pequin who brings the milk, and then in turn by the
postman--by her master, by the boy in eartabs and by every child in the
village since daylight for they have entered my courtyard in droves to
wish the household of my house abandoned a happy new year, and have gone
away content with their little stomachs filled and two big sous in their
pockets.

And now an old fisherman enters my door. It is the Pere Varnet--he who
goes out with his sheep dog to dig c