Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/284

 glistening patent-leather boots, and carried a gold-topped malacca. But the fact that his expletives began with the fourth instead of the second letter of the alphabet, stamped him, so everyone agreed, as a gentleman with a college education.

The men never mixed with the inhabitants of the towns, for none of them knew any French. At Dieppe, twenty-five of them had given notice; at Havre half of the orchestra were to leave us. Almost everyone was suffering from acute home-sickness; after the evening show the tent-men would sit round the petroleum lights smoking and eternally chatting of England.

A few kept a perfunctory route-book; but most of them, when we set out in the morning, had never troubled to learn the name of the town where we had spent the day. Their life was almost entirely centred in the busy routine of the camp.

Wednesday, 5 a.m.—lt was a short stage from Fécamp to Etretat; and as we got upon the road, the sun was already flooding the sky with crimson light. Beneath us the sea lay spread like a blue, wide, empty plain; by the roadside the reapers were hurrying to their work amid the corn-sheaves; the crowds were busy loading the long-bodied, four-wheeled Normandy waggons.

The wind had dropped, swelling milk-white clouds hung overhead. Every village was thronged with peasants, waiting to watch us go past. The fresh, warm rays of the morning sun crept through me, bringing a keen, exquisite exhilaration. And there returned my old instinctive affection for the terse picturesqueness of the so-called lower classes. And I remembered, with a twinge of bitter regret, that at the Havre I must leave them to journey