It was long since I had seen a human being, when I heard the click-clack of loose sabots coming nearer.  Presently a couple of young bulls showed their grim visages round a corner, and after them came a very small girl with a very long stick.  She looked about six years old, and she had great trouble to keep her little brown feet inside the wooden shoes, which were many sizes too large for her.  How was it that those big, and perhaps bad-tempered, animals allowed themselves to be driven and beaten by that child, whereas they would have turned upon a dog double her size, and done their best to toss him over the chestnut trees?  What is it that the brutes see below the surface of the human being to inspire them with such respect and fear of this biped, even when he or she has just crawled out of the cradle?  These bulls, by-the-bye, stopped and looked at me in a way that was anything but respectful, and I delayed the study of the metaphysical question until I could watch them from the rear.

I found on the top of the hill the village or hamlet that the old tramp had mentioned; but there was no sign of an inn—­indeed, there was no sign of anybody being alive in the place.  I threaded the steep little lanes between the houses and hovels, up to the ankles in dirty straw that had been turned out of the animals’ sheds, but saw nothing moving except fowls.  I knocked at various doors, and obtained no response.  It was clear that all the people, including the children, were away in the fields, and had left the village to take care of itself.  Hungry and thirsty, I was resigning myself with a heavy heart to trudge on, when I observed a column of blue smoke rise suddenly from a chimney, and I was not long in finding the house to which it belonged.  It was a dilapidated building, very wretched now, but with an air of bygone superiority.  This was chiefly shown in the Renaissance doorway, a rather elaborate piece of work, over which was the date 1602.  I ascended the steps with a little misgiving, for I thought that perhaps some cantankerous person whose family had seen better times might be living there, and that my questions as to food and drink might meet with surly answers.  I knocked, nevertheless, with my stick upon the old door studded with nail-heads.  It was opened, and before me stood a woman who looked old, but who was probably middle-aged; she was very poorly clad, very imperfectly washed, but on her tired and toil-worn face there was no forbidding expression.  I told her that I was looking for an auberge, and she said that hers was one au besoin.  It was the only one that answered at all to the name thereabouts.  So the smoke had led me to the right place.  I followed the heiress of the dilapidated house—­she was a descendant of the original owner—­through the dingy kitchen, where upon the hearth the fire of sticks that she had just lighted was blazing cheerfully, into a back room, where there were two beds without linen, and with nothing but