se far-spreading lands, those woods,
those heaths, those stretches of stony ground which were left
sterile around him? Since it was just that each man should bring his
contribution to the common weal, create subsistence for himself and his
offspring, why should not he, at the advent of each new child, supply
a new field of fertile earth which would give that child food, without
cost to the community? That was his sole idea; it took no more precise
shape; at the thought of realizing it he was carried off into splendid
dreams.

The Froments had been in the country fully a month when one evening
Marianne, wheeling Gervais's little carriage in front of her, came as
far as the bridge over the Yeuse to await Mathieu, who had promised
to return early. Indeed, he got there before six o'clock. And as
the evening was fine, it occurred to Marianne to go as far as the
Lepailleurs' mill down the river, and buy some new-laid eggs there.

"I'm willing," said Mathieu. "I'm very fond of their romantic old mill,
you know; though if it were mine I should pull it down and build another
one with proper appliances."

In the yard of the picturesque old building, half covered with ivy,
with its mossy wheel slumbering amid water-lilies, they found the
Lepailleurs, the man tall, dry, and carroty, the woman as carroty and
as dry as himself, but both of them young and hardy. Their child Antonin
was sitting on the ground, digging a hole with his little hands.

"Eggs?" La Lepailleur exclaimed; "yes, certainly, madame, there must be
some."

She made no haste to fetch them, however, but stood looking at Gervais,
who was asleep in his little vehicle.

"Ah! so that's your last. He's plump and pretty enough, I must say," she
remarked.

But Lepailleur raised a derisive laugh, and with the familiarity which
the peasant displays towards the bourgeois whom he knows to be hard up,
he said: "And so that makes you five, monsieur. Ah, well! that would be
a deal too many for poor folks like us."

"Why?" Mathieu quietly inquired. "Haven't you got this mill, and don't
you own fields, to give labor to the arms that would come and whose
labor would double and treble your produce?"

These simple words were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And
once again he poured forth all his spite. Ah! surely now, it wasn't his
tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched
neither his father nor his grandfather. And as for his fields,