ed me to know them both.
They were people of the soil, whose quarrel with the alphabet was so
great that they had never opened a book in their lives; and they kept
a lean farm on the cold granite ridge of the Rouergue tableland. The
house, standing alone among the heath and broom, with no neighbor for
many a mile around and visited at intervals by the wolves, was to them
the hub of the universe. But for a few surrounding villages, whither the
calves were driven on fair days, the rest was only very vaguely known
by hearsay. In this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their quagmires
oozing with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the principal source
of wealth, with rich, wet grass. In summer, on the short swards of the
slopes, the sheep were penned day and night, protected from beasts of
prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with pitchforks. When the grass
was cropped close at one spot, the fold was shifted elsewhere. In the
center was the shepherd's rolling hut, a straw cabin. Two watchdogs,
equipped with spiked collars, were answerable for tranquillity if the
thieving wolf appeared in the night from out the neighboring woods.

Padded with a perpetual layer of cow dung, in which I sank to my knees,
broken up with shimmering puddles of dark brown liquid manure, the
farmyard also boasted a numerous population. Here the lambs skipped, the
geese trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground and the sow grunted with
her swarm of little pigs hanging to her dugs.

The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances.
In a propitious season, they would set fire to a stretch of moorland
bristling with gorse and send the swing plow across the ground enriched
with the cinders of the blaze. This yielded a few acres of rye, oats
and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which furnished the
distaffs and spindles of the house with the material for linen and was
looked upon as grandmother's private crop.

Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in matters of
cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else. How dumbfounded
he would have been to learn that, in the remote future, one of his
family would become enamoured of those insignificant animals to which
he had never vouchsafed a glance in his life! Had he guessed that that
lunatic was myself, the scapegrace seated at the table by his side, what
a smack I should have caught in the neck, what a wrathful look!

"The idea of wasting one