MAGNETISM




THE OLD MAID


Count Eustache d'Etchegorry's solitary country house had the appearance
of a poor man's home, where people do not have enough to eat every day in
the week, where the bottles are more frequently filled at the pump than
in the cellar, and where they wait until it is dark before lighting the
candles.

It was an old and sordid building; the walls were crumbling to pieces,
the grated, iron gates were eaten away by rust, the holes in the broken
windows had been mended with old newspapers, and the ancestral portraits
which hung against the walls, showed that it was no tiller of the soil,
nor miserable laborer whose strength had gradually worn out and bent his
back, who lived there. Great, knotty elm trees sheltered it, as if they
had been a tall, green screen, and a large garden, full of wild
rose-trees and of straggling plants, as well as of sickly-looking
vegetables, which sprang up half-withered from the sandy soil, went
down as far as the bank of the river.

From the house, one could hear the monotonous sound of the water, which
at one time rushed yellow and impetuous towards the sea, and then again
flowed back, as if driven by some invisible force towards the town which
could be seen in the distance, with its pointed spires, its ramparts, and