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 passed substantial, comfortable-looking stone villages, villages that looked older than the gnarly chestnut trees that shaded them.

I wanted to learn the system by which these trees made a living for the village folk, so I joined the three men who sat chatting on the little common. It was a simple story that they told me. The men of the village were farmers. Their chief estate and sustenance were tracts of the grafted chestnut orchards that surrounded the village in all directions. In addition they owned little terraced vegetable gardens and alfalfa patches near the village. Every morning a flock of milch goats, attended by some member of the family, and perhaps accompanied by a donkey or two, or by a mule, went out to browse beneath the trees. Goat's milk, goat's-milk cheese, and goat flesh were important articles of diet in the village. I found that a meal of goat's-milk cheese and cakes made of chestnut flour was good.

The men told me that the year's work begins in August or September. A few weeks before chestnuts are ripe, the orchards are scythed to remove the things that goats and mules cannot eat. Then in September comes the chestnut harvest. At that season there is no school. Even the children help the men and women to pick up chestnuts. The nuts are carried upon the backs of donkeys, mules, and humans to the village. After harvest, pigs are loosed to turn over the leaves and find the nuts that have escaped the human eye. For the pigs, that is going back to nature.

Paris restaurateurs and butchers say that chestnut-fed pork is as good as any pork and is usually considered to be of superior quality. (Letter from American Vice-consul General, Paris, August 12, 1913.)