his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down.
My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven francs in
decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash
to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other
holy intercessor who has made a speciality of the health of
hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch broken
by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly
flourish, sound the _bien-aller_ with all your lungs. Jacques must stand
by, hat in hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across
his field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been. If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he
may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may become the
last and least among the servants at his lordship's kennel--one of the
two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at night among the
hounds?[42]

For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had
been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay
overseas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the
church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a
clump of spears and fluttering pennon drawing nigh across the plain,
these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the
wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the
coming and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but an
unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide all
change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often there was
none left alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions of field
from field. And yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night
into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a
company of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets there
were glad hearts and grateful prayers.

Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have
served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by
old association. These woods have rung