r wall, staring at the
darkness; and over me came creeping that apathy which I had already
learned to recognize and even welcome as a mental anaesthetic which set
that dark sentinel, care, a-drowsing.

What did I care, after all? Life had stopped for me years before;
there was left only a shell in which that unseen little trickster, the
heart, kept tap-tapping away against a tired body. Was that what we
call life? The sorry parody!

A shape slunk near me through the dusk, furtive, uncertain. "Lizard,"
I said, indifferently. He came up, my gun on his ragged shoulder.

"You go with your class?" I asked.

"No, I go to the forest," he said, hoarsely. "You shall hear from
me."

I nodded.

"Are you content?" he demanded, lingering.

The creature wanted sympathy, though he did not know it. I gave him my
hand and told him he was a brave man; and he went away, noiselessly,
leaving me musing by the river wall.

After a long while--or it may only have been a few minutes--the square
began to fill again with the first groups of women, children, and old
men who had escorted the departing conscripts a little way on their
march to Lorient. Back they came, the maids of Paradise silent,
tearful, pitifully acquiescent; the women of Bannalec, Faouet,
Rosporden, Quimperle chattering excitedly about the scene they had
witnessed. The square began to fill; lanterns were lighted around the
fountain; the two big lamps with their brass reflectors in front of
the mayor's house illuminated the pavement and the thin tree-foliage
with a yellow radiance.

The chatter grew louder as new groups in all sorts of gay head-dresses
arrived; laughter began to be heard; presently the squealing of the
biniou pipes broke out from the bowling-green, where, high on a bench
supported by a plank laid across two cider barrels, the hunchback sat,
skirling the farandole. Ah, what a world entire was this lost little
hamlet of Paradise, where merrymakers trod on the mourners' heels,
where the scream of the biniou drowned the floating note of the
passing bell, where Misery drew the curtains of her bed and lay
sleepless, listening to Gayety dancing breathless to the patter of a
coquette's wooden shoes!

Long tables were improvised in the square, piled up with bread,
sardines, puddings, hams, and cakes. Casks of cider, propped on skids,
dotted the outskirts of the bowling-green, where the mayor, enthroned
in his own arm-chair, majestically gave his orders in a