hundred, three hundred, a hundred times a hundred would not be too
much. Oh, how the poor child was screaming. She could hardly bear to
stand outside the door doing nothing any longer.

Little Jean-Pierre's sister and brothers--a beautiful girl with
untidy hair and three younger brothers--stood with their fingers in
their mouths, their dirty noses unwiped, and did not move from the
spot.

Their mother spoke to them angrily, "Off with you!" And they darted
off, one almost tumbling over another. They scraped the key out of the
little hole under the door, and the biggest of them thrust it into the
rusty lock, and, standing on her toes, turned it with all the strength
of her small hands.

Then the woman turned to the strange lady and gentleman; she made a
gesture of invitation with her thin right hand: "Entrez."

They stepped in. It was so low inside that Paul Schlieben had to
bend his head so as not to knock against the beams in the ceiling, and
so dark that it took a considerable time before they could distinguish
anything at all. It could not have been poorer anywhere--one single
room in all. The hearth was formed of unhewn stones roughly put
together, above it hung the kettle in an iron chain that was made fast
to the blackened beam; the smoke from the smouldering peat ascended
into the wide sooty chimney. A couple of earthenware plates in the
plate-rack--cracked but with gay-coloured flowers on them--a couple of
dented pewter vessels, a milk-pail, a wooden tub, a long bench behind
the table, on the table half a loaf of bread and a knife, a few clothes
on some nails, the double bed built half into the wall, in which the
widow no doubt slept with the children now, and little Jean-Pierre's
clumsy wooden cradle in front of it--that was all.

Really all? Kate looked round, shivering a little in the cold dark
room that was as damp as a cellar. Oh, how poor and comfortless. There
were no ornaments, nothing to decorate it. Oh yes, there was a
glaringly gaudy picture of the Virgin Mary--a coarse colour-print on
thin paper--a vessel for holy water made of white china beneath it, and
there on the other wall close to the window so that the sparse light
fell on it the picture of a soldier. A framed and glazed picture in
three divisions; the same foot-soldier taken three times. To the
left, shouldering his arms, on guard before the black and white
sentry-box--to the right, ready to march with knapsack and cooking
utensils st