lock his ragged guest up for the night, and before letting him out in the morning would often carry some soup to him—­stealthily, however, so as not to be observed.  As he was always ready to give, and hated every harsh measure, it was to his wood that the unscrupulous went in winter, when they wanted fuel.  Sometimes an informer would say to him:  ‘M——­ So-and-so is cutting down your wood.’  ’Oh, bast! le pauvre.  It is cold weather!’ was the reply that he would be most likely to make.  His good qualities would have ruined him had not destiny with great discernment and charity nailed him to his little patrimony, where he was comparatively safe.

The bees in the loft were instructive and the rats amusing, but the fleas were neither the one nor the other—­they were merely exciting.  And so it came to pass that I forsook the place, and by climbing a little staircase cut in the rock, against which the house was built, reached a cavern far above the roof and found at last my ideal writing-place upon the ledge in front of it, where the mallow and the crane’s-bill crept over a patch of turf.  Here the voices of the noisy little world below were sufficiently toned down by distance.  The noisiest creatures up here were the jackdaws, which were constantly flying in and out of the holes in the church wall that rose above me from another and wider ledge of rock.  A pair of sooty-looking rock-swallows that had made their nest in the roof of the cavern were much irritated by my presence, but, like the rats, they became reconciled to it.  The little martins, always trustful, never hesitated from the first to fly into the cave and drink from the dripping water.  When the dusk came on, the bats, which had been hanging by their winged heels all day in dusky holes and corners, fluttered out one after another, and went zigzagging until they were lost to sight over the old stone roofs on which the moss had blackened.

A little before the bats came out was the time when to do aught else but let the sight feast upon the beauty of the rocky little world bounded by the walls of the narrow gorge would have been literally to waste the golden moments.  Then it was that the naked crags, which caught the almost level rays of the setting sun, grew brighter and more brilliantly coruscating, until they seemed ready to melt from the intensity of their own heat; then this fiery golden colour would slowly fade and wane into misty purple tones, which lingered long when there was no more sun.  Why did it linger?  All the sky that I could see was blue, and of deepening tone.  But the most wonderful sight was yet to come, when, while the valley was fast darkening, and along the banks of the Alzou’s dry channel the walnut-trees stood like dark spectres of uncertain form, those rocks began to glow with fire again as if a wind had risen suddenly and had fanned their dying embers, and the luminous bloom that spread over them was not that of the earthly rose, but of the mystical rose of heaven.  What I saw was the reflection of the after-glow, but the glow in the sky was hidden.  Sometimes, as the rocks were fading again and a star was already glittering like steel against the dark blue, another flush arose in the dusk, and a faint redness still rested upon the high crags, when the owl flew forth with a shriek to hunt along the sides of the gorge.