niere's brandy-flask, the gourd, the firkin?' He stopped his
oxen fiercely and turned round to us and said: 'I will tell you what I
have here. I have so many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made
myself, and which I know to be the best wine there is, and I am taking
it about to see if I cannot tame and break these proud fellows who are
for ever beating down prices and mocking me. It is worth eight
'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight sols the litre; what do I
say? it is worth a Louis a cup: but I will sell it at the price I
name, and not a penny less. But whenever I come to a village the
innkeeper begins bargaining and chaffering and offering six sols and
seven sols, and I answer, "Eight sols, take it or leave it", and when
he seems for haggling again I get up and drive away. I know the worth
of my wine, and I will not be beaten down though I have to go out of
Lorraine into the Barrois to sell it.'

So when we caught him up again, as we did shortly after on the road, a
sergeant cried as we passed, 'I will give you seven, seven and a
quarter, seven and a half', and we went on laughing and forgot all
about him.

For many days we marched from this place to that place, and fired and
played a confused game in the hot sun till the train of sick horses
was a mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as so many
posts; and at last, one evening, we came to a place called Heiltz le
Maurupt, which was like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and
whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as Angels; it is just
where the Champagne begins. When we had groomed and watered our
horses, and the stable guard had been set, and we had all an hour or
so's leisure to stroll about in the cool darkness before sleeping in
the barns, we had a sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for
what should come up the village street but that monstrous Barrel, and
we could see by its movements that it was still quite full.

We gathered round the peasant, and told him how grieved we were at his
ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the people of the Barrois
were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such a song. He took
his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by, and there
he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness
suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger
than sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood
from which tyrants and martyrs ar