embarrassment they grew every year, and cost more money.  It had been necessary to send the three boys to a little school at Janville, which was as yet but a small expense.  But would it not be necessary to send them the following year to a college, and where was the money for this to come from?  A grave problem, a worry which grew from hour to hour, and which for Mathieu somewhat spoilt that charming spring whose advent was flowering the countryside.

The worst was that Mathieu deemed himself immured, as it were, in his position as designer at the Beauchene works.  Even admitting that his salary should some day be doubled, it was not seven or eight thousand francs a year which would enable him to realize his dream of a numerous family freely and proudly growing and spreading like some happy forest, indebted solely for strength, health, and beauty to the good common mother of all, the earth, which gave to all its sap.  And this was why, since his return to Janville, the earth, the soil had attracted him, detained him during his frequent walks, while he revolved vague but ever-expanding thoughts in his mind.  He would pause for long minutes, now before a field of wheat, now on the verge of a leafy wood, now on the margin of a river whose waters glistened in the sunshine, and now amid the nettles of some stony moorland.  All sorts of vague plans then rose within him, uncertain reveries of such vast scope, such singularity, that he had as yet spoken of them to nobody, not even his wife.  Others would doubtless have mocked at him, for he had as yet but reached that dim, quivering hour when inventors feel the gust of their discovery sweep over them, before the idea that they are revolving presents itself with full precision to their minds.  Yet why did he not address himself to the soil, man’s everlasting provider and nurse?  Why did he not clear and fertilize those far-spreading lands, those woods, those heaths, those stretches of stony ground which were left sterile around him?  Since it was just that each man should bring his contribution to the common weal, create subsistence for himself and his offspring, why should not he, at the advent of each new child, supply a new field of fertile earth which would give that child food, without cost to the community?  That was his sole idea; it took no more precise shape; at the thought of realizing it he was carried off into splendid dreams.

The Froments had been in the country fully a month when one evening Marianne, wheeling Gervais’s little carriage in front of her, came as far as the bridge over the Yeuse to await Mathieu, who had promised to return early.  Indeed, he got there before six o’clock.  And as the evening was fine, it occurred to Marianne to go as far as the Lepailleurs’ mill down the river, and buy some new-laid eggs there.

“I’m willing,” said Mathieu.  “I’m very fond of their romantic old mill, you know; though if it were mine I should pull it down and build another one with proper appliances.”