dy has the right to leave me without
bread!"

A fine, thick, icy cold rain was coming down, and he stopped and
murmured: "Oh, misery! Another month of walking before I get home." He
was indeed returning home then, for he saw that he should more easily
find work in his native town, where he was known--and he did not mind
what he did--than on the highroads, where everybody suspected him. As
the carpentering business was not prosperous, he would turn day laborer,
be a mason's hodman, a ditcher, break stones on the road. If he only
earned a franc a day, that would at any rate buy him something to eat.

He tied the remains of his last pocket handkerchief round his neck to
prevent the cold rain from running down his back and chest, but he soon
found that it was penetrating the thin material of which his clothes
were made, and he glanced about him with the agonized look of a man who
does not know where to hide his body and to rest his head, and has no
place of shelter in the whole world.

Night came on and wrapped the country in obscurity, and in the distance,
in a meadow, he saw a dark spot on the grass; it was a cow, and so he
got over the ditch by the roadside and went up to her without exactly
knowing what he was doing. When he got close to her she raised her great
head to him, and he thought: "If I only had a jug I could get a little
milk." He looked at the cow and the cow looked at him and then, suddenly
giving her a kick in the side, he said: "Get up!"

The animal got up slowly, letting her heavy udders bang down. Then the
man lay down on his back between the animal's legs and drank for a long
time, squeezing her warm, swollen teats, which tasted of the cowstall,
with both hands, and he drank as long as she gave any milk. But the icy
rain began to fall more heavily, and he saw no place of shelter on the
whole of that bare plain. He was cold, and he looked at a light which
was shining among the trees in the window of a house.

The cow had lain down again heavily, and he sat down by her side and
stroked her head, grateful for the nourishment she had given him. The
animal's strong, thick breath, which came out of her nostrils like two
jets of steam in the evening air, blew on the workman's face, and he
said: "You are not cold inside there!" He put his hands on her chest and
under her stomach to find some warmth there, and then the idea struck
him that he might pass the night beside that large, warm animal. So he
found