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124 that was there and it looked like a boy. Wasn't he a little devil though. You understand, I couldn't know that. He was a wealthy cousin of mine. Round there we are all related, all cousins—as in Brittany. He wasn't much bigger than myself but he was older, just a boy in blue breeches and with good shoes on his feet, which of course interested and impressed me. He yelled to me from below, I screamed to him from above, he came up and sat down near me on a stone, never said a word, let me look at him for half an hour before he condescended to ask me who I was. And the airs he gave himself! He quite intimidated me sitting there perfectly dumb. I remember trying to hide my bare feet under the edge of my skirt as I sat below him on the ground.

"C'est comique, eh!" she interrupted herself to comment in a melancholy tone. I looked at her sympathetically and she went on:

"He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the slope. In winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa. He had an enormous opinion of himself; he was going to keep a shop in a town by and by and he was about the most dissatisfied creature I have ever seen. He had an unhappy mouth and unhappy eyes and he was always wretched about something: about the treatment he received, about being kept in the country and chained to work. He was moaning and complaining and threatening all the world, including his father and mother. He used to curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there on a piece of rock like a wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow peeking at his miserable little liver. And the grand scenery of mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!"

She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with