purposes, but also for the entertainment of guests, especially on fair and
market days, when space is precious. There was a table with a bench for the
use of drinkers. There were, moreover, three beds, but I was careful to
ascertain that none would be occupied except by myself. I would sooner
have slept on a bundle of hay in the loft than have had an unknown person
snoring in the same room with me. One has always some prejudice to
overcome. The bed was not soft, and the hempen sheets were as coarse as
canvas, but these trifles did not trouble me. I listened to the song of
the crickets on the hearth downstairs until drowsiness beckoned sleep and
consciousness of the present lost its way in sylvan labyrinths by the
Dordogne.

At six o'clock the next morning I was walking about the village, and I
entered the little church, already filled with people. It was Sunday, and
this early mass was to be a funeral one. The man for whom the bell was
tolled last night was soon brought in, the coffin swathed in a common
sheet. It was borne up the nave towards the catafalque, the rough carpentry
of which showed how poor the parish was. Following closely was an old and
bent woman with her head wrapped in a black shawl. She had hardly gone a
few steps, when her grief burst out into the most dismal wailing I had ever
heard, and throughout the service her melancholy cries made other women
cover their faces, and tears start from the eyes of hard-featured,
weather-beaten men.

[Illustration: A MOORLAND WIDOW.]

Most of the women present wore the very ugly headgear which is the most
common of all in Auvergne and the Correze, namely, a white cap covered by
a straw bonnet something of the coal-scuttle pattern. There were many
communicants at this six o'clock mass, and what struck me as being the