this before me, he proceeded to crack the eggs and empty them into the
frying-pan. As a cook he had no pretensions, but he knew how to fry eggs.
When my meal was ready, and he had placed everything before me upon the
bare board, he sat at a little distance eating a dry old crust with a piece
of goat cheese. This was his lunch. I insisted upon his sharing the wine
with me, and this little attention made him thoroughly confiding and
cheery.

He was left a widower, he told me, with four children, at the age of
thirty-eight, and he would not take a second wife because, his father
having done so, he remembered the trials and tribulations of his own
childhood which came of his having 'a mother who was not a mother.' He said
to himself, 'My children shall not run the risk of going through what I
went through.' He toiled on alone, brought up his family himself, added
to his bit of land in course of years, and acquired other property. His
children were now all settled in life, and he had given them everything he
had except the cottage in which he lived. I was struck by the strong virtue
of this illiterate peasant, who had evidently no notion of his own value,
and who would not have told the simple story of his life passed amidst the
moors of the Correze had I not drawn it from him.

[Illustration: A PEASANT OF THE MOORS.]

As I watched the old man, prematurely bent by labour, eating his hard
crust, cheerful and contented, after giving to others the fruit of his many
years of toil, I thought, 'If man were nothing but an animal, such a life
would be not only absurd, but impossible.' Another glass of wine made my
host and cook still more talkative. He told me that not long ago he had
walked from this village to Tulle, distant about thirty-five miles, to
see a soldier son who was to pass through the place with his regiment. He