the Aveyron, trout with a faint flavour of the soil tinging its harmonious flesh-but all these delights are minimised in value if that Sphinx of a door has not delivered up its daily secret. Tuk-Tuk and Kissme, little Faust and Mimi, are about our feet, but we give them only a half attention until the query of the door has been solved. Or rather, it depends. If the wind is from the west, we don't give the door a thought-we enjoy our soupe, our pinard, our trout to its most delicious full; but if the wind is easterly, or if it hangs with the heavy languorous stillness of a breathless midsummer, why, then, this door is Fate for us.

The house of Tuk Tuk's owner takes up one full side of the triangular place: it is a long narrow house, and so steeply does the place run that the first storey at this side, the storey with the terrace over Tuk-Tuk's lodging, becomes the ground-floor at the corner; the square mounts a whole storey in the length of one house. We sit just beyond the apex of the triangle, the base of which contains the shops of the grocer and of the baker. The shop of the grocer is all bright with advertisements: chocolate Ménier, crême Éclipse, pâté Lion Noir, and so on, splash a gaiety of tint, like festival flags, in the sobriety of the mottled greys and ochres of the old buildings, the most recent of which, that of Tuk-Tuk's owner, bears a graven

date, 1789, the year of the Revolution. The épicier is a man, small by nature, yet further diminished by the contractions of age, and of his trade, cobbling, which, aided by rheumatism, has so bowed his back and his knees that he seems about a full two-thirds only of his real height; his wife, also tiny, has the face of a papier-mâché mask flattened by packing-that is, her nose is a nose without being a projection, and is isolated by depressions as a Roman camp standing on a plain is defended by dykes. The old épicier and his wife, of course, own their house, so do Tuk-Tuk's masters, so do the Soltress's who lodge and feed us; while the third side of the place is formed by a long low cattle-shed with a high-pitched roof and tottering gables slated with slabs of micaschist carefully trimmed to a rounded edge. The only person in the place who is not born, bred, and rooted by family traditions and ownership is the baker, who neighbours the épicier-cobbler. He is a tenant, but bakers make large profits; he can afford to rent a house; whereas neither the épiciercobbler, nor the tobacconistcooper, who lives a little farther downhill, nor indeed any of the minor village tradesmen, gain enough to pay house rent.

As we sit eating our trout, while Tuk-Tuk on the one side and Mimi on the other come expectantly for morsels inedible by man, the baker lounges out of his shop and lowers himself

an

gently on to the large block of stone which is posed beside his door. He is clad in raiment dusted with flour, on his head he wears an extravagant cap developed by the fantasy of the French from the serviceable golf cap of England, and under the peak his face shows cadaverous like that of ascetic painted by Crivelli. His hands, gleaming in the sun as they hang over the dark shadows between his knees, are like the hands of a skeleton thrust into surgical gloves, so stretched and transparent is the skin over the bones. He sits thus, absorbing the sunlight for hours during the daytime, but how much longer will he be permitted thus to warm himself? Poor fellow, he is a war wreck. Captured during the fighting, imprisoned in Germany, he could not submit to destiny, he has no Kismet in him.

He has a bitter temperament-smashed a fellow-prisoner's foot with a lump of pig-iron for a rough word; can imagine no fate other than murder and sudden death for the least of his opponents in politics. Prison could not hold him he broke out five times. But destiny was too hard for him, he was doomed to be crushed: on one attempt at night he walked into Switzerland, lost his way, and had wandered back into Germany once more, never knowing that he had achieved freedom. No punishment could mitigate the sourness of his blood, but it could and did undermine his

physique, and so now he sits listless in the sun, cheerful with the pathetic optimism of the consumptive, ready alike for a conversation with a friend or for a bicker with an enemy.

The baker's shop has two entries side by side; the one leads into the shop, where are stacked the huge bun-shaped loaves eighteen inches in diameter a tough task to carry home for many a small girl who staggers away over the cobbles clasping with strained arms and tense fingers the crusty edge. The other door lets you into the narrow gloomy bakehouse, where tier upon tier are stacked dough - baskets, made of withy strips and straw as were our old beehives, where the grey front of the oven reverberates a dull heat, and where stands the electrical dough-mixer, over which presides Cou-Cou, the baker's lean assistant, a good workman, but an indefatigable devotee of the delights of the village fête, not one of which for miles around he ever misses.

As we sit shredding the débris of the trout on either side to whichever of the animals seems to be the most eager, an ox-cart loaded with faggots comes along. We are in the period between the harvest and the vine-gathering: the peasants have nothing to do but to draw in from their woods the supply of fuel for the winter, coal being almost unused in Janac. The cart comes groaning as though it has rheumatism in its joints,

and it moves almost with the careful air of the rheumatic. Before it the serious oxen step with deliberation, turning out their fore-feet as though they had been trained by a Victorian dancing-master: their patient reproachful eyes are invisible, for as the weather is hot they wear against the flies veils of closely-woven string, Mussulwomen amongst animals. They go, yoked head to head with horns interlocked under a great wooden yoke which unites them more rigorously than does the marriage service, for practically the only part left free from this communism is the tail. Before the oxen strolls the driver or rather leader, who lounges on with what appears to be the gait of a man bored of life, which is in reality from habit calculated to the exact paces of his deliberate bcasts. Over his shoulder he carries a long hazel wand, and from time to time he leans back with a graceful slow gesture and with the rod touches the yoke between the oxen, thus intimating to the beasts that their road is still straightforward. At any turn he indicates the direction by the movement of his rod as though he were steering a ship by the bows. The tower of brushwood moves by us, sweeping down from the acacia-trees a shower of leaves which TukTuk swallows in default of further fish-bones or pellets of bread, and for which the clumsy ducks of Madame Soltress waddle out of the artificial pool which our good hostess has

contrived by a dam across the opposite gutter and a few pailfuls of water. The ox-cart goes slowly across the triangular place, and then has to contrive to swing around into the narrow road steeply descending from the lower corner. The oxdriver makes uncouth noises to his beasts; he steers them well out ere he gives with the long wand that angular movement which makes the righthand ox pivot outwards, and which makes the old cart groan as though afflicted with a hundred torments. As soon as they feel the slope, the oxen move with yet greater care. The whole weight of the cart is now upon their foreheads, their massive necks quiver with the strain, the vibration of the cart on the cobbles is transmitted through the shaft-pole and through the wooden yoke directly to their brain - pans. If they had headaches, would this gigantic vibrant massage cure the ill, I wonder? Fancy a vibrator of half a ton playing on your cerebellum.

The villagers hereabouts, in Languedoc, cannot understand or even mentally picture an oxenless England; they cannot imagine how without draught - cattle farming is to be done. To see sleek kine standing lazily in the lush grass, cows which have no purpose other than that of transforming chlorophyll and carbohydrates into proteids and fats, would shock them profoundly. Fainéant, do nothing, they would call them, as,

indeed, they dub us or anybody who does not labour with hoe or with fork, anybody who is not bent under the Adamite curse in the most obvious way. The Southern Frenchman is in truth too excitable to use horses for rough work: he can manœuvre the slow ox in complex situations, he can shout a panic at his will-the ox has no nerves; but the average Southern farmer would have his horses as hysterical as are his dogs if he were set to handle them over difficult country. Here horses are for the roads, and even so but one man in the village ventures to drive them in a team. Yet though the ox is methodical and apparently not unintelligent to work with, he is a problem to shoe. I think, like so many otherwise phlegmatic persons, he must be ticklish: at any rate, a whole elaborate apparatus, a sort of ox-dock, is needed to fit him for the road. A stout erection of solid beams receives his body, and in it he is hoisted and strapped immovably in every part, except his alarmed tail, which, often weighted with dung, remains a formidable mace ready to welt an incautious blacksmith over the head, an unsavoury weapon. The ox has eight shoes, two for each foot, since it is cloven. The irons are almond-shaped, with tongues which are bent over the point of the hoof. They are fixed by nails to the outside of the hoof only, and the tongue, slipping up through the

cleft, is bent over the horn to hold the iron in place. In Serbia they use no such elaborate gallows for shoeing the oxen; they tether the animal's legs to a heavy beam, roll him over on to his back, and so have the hoofs presented upwards most conveniently for work. The primitive may often be an improvement upon the sophisticated.

He

The blacksmith, by the way, is also a Fainéant in the eyes of the peasant. His smithy is reinforced by a café, and he is, I should say, a warm man. He is a quick worker, and spends much of his spare time sitting by the roadside gossiping with the consumptive baker. I don't, indeed, know what else he could do, with profit. has taken a broad view of the competition between the blacksmith and the factory he says "the man who makes agricultural implements by hand is a fool; he can gain more profit by purchasing and reselling machine-made ones." So that when he is not employed in shoeing horses or cattle, when not engaged in tiring wheels with a large bonfire in the open street, when not occupied in mending kitchen ranges, there is nothing for him to do. Yet he is a donothing; he doesn't work the earth.

Another "do- nothing" is the husband of the tobacconistcooper's daughter. He is an ex-American soldier, pensioned with 700 francs a month—a fortune in the village,-with