Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/26

Rh must make yourself.' He swallowed a mouthful or two, then pushed his plate away again. No, it wouldn't go down, no mistake about it. When dinner was over, he went for a walk on the farm, and gave the lad a holiday, saying he would shift the beasts as he passed. On this day of rest the landscape was empty. Here and there in a clover-field the cows lay heavily stretched on their bellies, chewing the cud, in the full glare of the sun. Ploughs, without their teams, waited on the headland, and the upturned soil, ready for sowing, spread large brown squares amid the yellow fields where the stubble of the lately reaped oat and wheat harvest was now rotting. A rather dry autumn wind passed over the plain, foretelling a cool evening after sundown. Benoist sat on a dike, set his hat on his knees, as though needing the breeze on his forehead, and repeated out loud, in the silence of the country, ' That's a pretty girl, if ever there was one.'"

The slow process of the human ruminant could hardly be presented with greater simplicity and directness.

It is a rather singular fact that so far as Maupassant is popularly known in England, he is specially quoted as a master of the horrible and grotesque, a sort of French Edgar Poe. This