ere gnarled and leafless, but they overspread most of the little
three-cornered space which constituted the village green, and the sun
upon their interlacing surfaces cheerfully suggested the coming of
spring. Three famished peasants sat on the bench. The bones protruded on
their hollow faces, and their eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. They
were all over fifty; one was much older, and leaned feebly on a cudgel.
Their dress was mean and patched; their battered sabots stuffed with
straw and wool. One was whittling with a curved knife. He was a
sabot-maker.

"It is not possible to live this way," he protested. "People will not
buy sabots nor bucket-yokes."

"They need food before sabots," remarked the old man.

"But I too must have food. Are we never to have good bread again? Three
years ago we had good bread."

"This barley, half eaten away, produces more bran than flour," said the
old man, trembling with weakness. "To make bread of it, my woman is
obliged to work it over several times, and each time there seems so
little left that she weeps. We must soon die."

"Yet there is always a fight for it at the wickets, when it is
distributed," said the third man.

"And one must fight to keep his share. I go to the wickets with my big
knife out," the sabot-maker added fiercely.

"And when one eats it, it gives him inflammation and pains," continued
the old man. "I have seen many years of famine, but never so little
bread, and that so hard and stinking."

"As for me I have found a secret," gravely said the third man, whose
hollow countenance displayed an unnatural pallor. "Over in the
Seigneur's park, above the little spring of water, there is a ledge of
rock. Below that ledge there lies plenty of white clay. That clay is
good to eat. You are hungry no more when you have taken breakfast of
that."

"My God! is our parish reduced to eating earth?" exclaimed the oldest of
the men. "What is to become of France? Heaven is against us."

"I came here before my children woke, because it pierces my heart to
listen to their crying," the sabot-maker said dejectedly.

"Yet everybody knows there is so much good grain in the barns of the new
Seigneur," the earth-eater said in a whining voice.

"While Monsieur the Chevalier lived none starved, at least," the old man
said, his head bowed in despair upon the top of his staff. "What is to
become of us now?"

"It is the fault of the bad people about our King," remarked the
ear