troops right and left. In the yard of Bacadou's farm the dark ribbon

wound itself up into a mass of men and women pushing at the door with
cries and greetings. The wedding dinner was remembered for months. It

was a splendid feast in the orchard. Farmers of considerable means
and excellent repute were to be found sleeping in ditches, all along

the road to Treguier, even as late as the afternoon of the next day.
All the countryside participated in the happiness of Jean-Pierre. He

remained sober, and, together with his quiet wife, kept out of the
way, letting father and mother reap their due of honour and thanks.

But the next day he took hold strongly, and the old folks felt a
shadow--precursor of the grave--fall upon them finally. The world is

to the young.
When the twins were born there was plenty of room in the house, for

the mother of Jean-Pierre had gone away to dwell under a heavy stone
in the cemetery of Ploumar. On that day, for the first time since his

son's marriage, the elder Bacadou, neglected by the cackling lot of
strange women who thronged the kitchen, left in the morning his seat

under the mantel of the fireplace, and went into the empty cow-house,
shaking his white locks dismally. Grandsons were all very well, but he

wanted his soup at midday. When shown the babies, he stared at them
with a fixed gaze, and muttered something like: "It's too much."

Whether he meant too much happiness, or simply commented upon the
number of his descendants, it is impossible to say. He looked offended

--as far as his old wooden face could express anything; and for days
afterwards could be seen, almost any time of the day, sitting at the

gate, with his nose over his knees, a pipe between his gums, and
gathered up into a kind of raging concentrated sulkiness. Once he

spoke to his son, alluding to the newcomers with a groan: "They will
quarrel over the land." "Don't bother about that, father," answered

Jean-Pierre, stolidly, and passed, bent double, towing a recalcitrant
cow over his shoulder.

He was happy, and so was Susan, his wife. It was not an ethereal joy
welcoming new souls to struggle, perchance to victory. In fourteen

years both boys would be a help; and, later on, Jean-Pierre pictured
two big sons striding over the land from patch to patch, wringing

tribute from the earth beloved and fruitful. Susan was happy too, for
she did not want to be spoken of as the unfortunate woman, and now she

had children no one could call her that. Both herself and her husband
had seen something of the larger world--he during the time of his

service; while she had spent a year or so in Paris with a Breton
family; but had been too home-sick to remain longer away from the

hilly and green country, set in a barrencircle of rocks and sands,
where she had been born. She thought that one of the boys ought

perhaps to be a priest, but said nothing to her husband, who was a
republican, and hated the "crows," as he called the ministers of

religion. The christening was a splendid affair. All the commune came
to it, for the Bacadous were rich and influential, and, now and then,

did not mind the expense. The grandfather had a new coat.
Some months afterwards, one evening when the kitchen had been swept,

and the door locked, Jean-Pierre, looking at the cot, asked his wife:
"What's the matter with those children?" And, as if these words,

spokencalmly, had been the portent of misfortune, she answered with
a loud wail that must have been heard across the yard in the pig-sty;

for the pigs (the Bacadous had the finest pigs in the country) stirred
and grunted complainingly in the night. The husband went on grinding

his bread and butter slowly, gazing at the wall, the soup-plate
smoking under his chin. He had returned late from the market, where he

had overheard (not for the first time) whispers behind his back. He
revolved the words in his mind as he drove back. "Simple! Both of

them. . . . Never any use! . . . Well! May be, may be. One must see.
Would ask his wife." This was her answer. He felt like a blow on his

chest, but said only: "Go, draw me some cider. I am thirsty!"
She went out moaning, an empty jug in her hand. Then he arose, took up

the light, and moved slowly towards the cradle. They slept. He looked
at them sideways, finished his mouthful there, went back heavily, and

sat down before his plate. When his wife returned he never looked up,
but swallowed a couple of spoonfuls noisily, and remarked, in a dull

manner--
"When they sleep they are like other people's children."

She sat down suddenly on a stool near by, and shook with a silent
tempest of sobs, unable to speak. He finished his meal, and remained

idly thrown back in his chair, his eyes lost amongst the black rafters
of the ceiling. Before him the tallow candle flared red and straight,

sending up a slender thread of smoke. The light lay on the rough,
sunburnt skin of his throat; the sunk cheeks were like patches of

darkness, and his aspect was mournfully stolid, as if he had
ruminated with difficulty endless ideas. Then he said, deliberately--

"We must see . . . consult people. Don't cry. . . . They won't all be
like that . . . surely! We must sleep now."

After the third child, also a boy, was born, Jean-Pierre went about
his work with tense hopefulness. His lips seemed more narrow, more

tightly compressed than before; as if for fear of letting the earth he
tilled hear the voice of hope that murmured within his breast. He

watched the child, stepping up to the cot with a heavy clang of sabots
on the stone floor, and glanced in, along his shoulder, with that

indifference which is like a deformity of peasanthumanity. Like the
earth they master and serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not

show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them
as with the earth, what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force

mysterious and terrible--or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and
inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain

life or give death.
The mother watched with other eyes; listened with otherwise expectant

ears. Under the high hangingshelves supporting great sides of bacon
overhead, her body was busy by the great fireplace, attentive to the

pot swinging on iron gallows, scrubbing the long table where the field
hands would sit down directly to their evening meal. Her mind remained

by the cradle, night and day on the watch, to hope and suffer. That
child, like the other two, never smiled, never stretched its hands to

her, never spoke; never had a glance of recognition for her in its
big black eyes, which could only stare fixedly at any glitter, but

failed hopelessly to follow the brilliance of a sun-ray slipping
slowly along the floor. When the men were at work she spent long days

between her three idiot children and the childishgrandfather, who sat
grim, angular, and immovable, with his feet near the warm ashes of the

fire. The feeble old fellow seemed to suspect that there was something
wrong with his grandsons. Only once, moved either by affection or by

the sense of proprieties, he attempted to nurse the youngest. He took
the boy up from the floor, clicked his tongue at him, and essayed a

shaky gallop of his bony knees. Then he looked closely with his misty
eyes at the child's face and deposited him down gently on the floor

again. And he sat, his lean shanks crossed, nodding at the steam
escaping from the cooking-pot with a gaze senile and worried.

Then mute affliction dwelt in Bacadou's farmhouse, sharing the breath
and the bread of its inhabitants; and the priest of the Ploumar parish

had great cause for congratulation. He called upon the rich landowner,
the Marquis de Chavanes, on purpose to deliver himself with joyful

unction of solemn platitudes about the inscrutable ways of
Providence. In the vast dimness of the curtained drawing-room, the

little man, resembling a black bolster, leaned towards a couch, his
hat on his knees, and gesticulated with a fat hand at the elongated,

gracefully-flowing lines of the clear Parisian toilette from which the
half-amused, half-bored marquise listened with gracious languor. He

was exulting and humble, proud and awed. The impossible had come to
pass. Jean-Pierre Bacadou, the enraged republican farmer, had been to

mass last Sunday--had proposed to entertain the visiting priests at
the next festival of Ploumar! It was a triumph for the Church and for

the good cause. "I thought I would come at once to tell Monsieur le
Marquis. I know how anxious he is for the welfare of our country,"

declared the priest, wiping his face. He was asked to stay to dinner.
The Chavanes returning that evening, after seeing their guest to the

main gate of the park, discussed the matter while they strolled in the
moonlight, trailing their long shadows up the straight avenue of

chestnuts. The marquise, a royalist of course, had been mayor of the
commune which includes Ploumar, the scattered hamlets of the coast,

and the stony islands that fringe the yellow flatness of the sands. He
had felt his position insecure, for there was a strong republican

element in that part of the country; but now the conversion of