ave issues of Life and Death.

Here (said Duchemin) nothing can disturb me; and it is high time for me
to be considering what I am to make of the remainder of my days. Too
many of them have been wasted, too great a portion of my span has been
sacrificed to vanities. One must not forget one is in a fair way to
become a grandfather; it is plainly an urgent duty to reconcile oneself
to that estate and cultivate its proper gravity and decorum. Yet a
little while and one must bid adieu to that Youth which one has so
heedlessly squandered, a last adieu to Youth with its days of high
adventure, its carefree heart, its susceptibility to the infinite
seductions of Romance.

Quite seriously the adventurer entertained a premonition of his
to-morrow, a vision of himself in skull-cap and seedy clothing (the
trousers well-bagged at the knees) with rather more than a mere hint of
an equator emphasized by grease-spots on his waistcoat, presiding over
the fortunes of one of those dingy little Parisian shops wherein
debatable antiques accumulate dust till they fetch the ducats of the
credulous; and of a Sunday walking out, in a shiny frock-coat with his
ribbon of the Legion in the buttonhole, a ratty topper crowning his
placid brows, a humid grandchild adhering to his hand: a thrifty and
respectable bourgeois, the final avatar of a rolling stone!

Yes: it is amusing, but quite true; though it would need a deal of
contriving, something little short of a revolution to bring it about,
to precisely such a future as that did Duchemin most seriously propose
to dedicate himself.

But always, they say, it is God who disposes....

And for all this mood of premature resignation to the bourgeois virtues
Duchemin was glad enough when his fourth day in Meyrueis dawned fair,
and by eight was up and away, purposing a round day's tramp across the
Causse Noir to Montpellier-le-Vieux (concerning which one heard curious
tales), then on by way of the gorge of the Dourbie to Millau for the
night.

Nor would he heed the dubious head shaken by his host of Meyrueis, who
earnestly advised a guide. The Causses, he declared, were treacherous;
men sometimes lost their way upon those lofty plains and were never
heard of more. Duchemin didn't in the least mind getting lost, that is
to say failing to make his final objective; at worst he could depend
upon a good memory and an unfailing sense of direction to lead him back
the way he had come.

He was to learn