I soon reached one of these caverns, the embattled wall being a conspicuous object from the road below.  Having fallen into ruin, it had lately been repaired at the expense of the commune.  To an Englishman the spot could not be otherwise than strangely interesting.  I imagined my own language being spoken there five or six centuries ago, and speculated as to whether the accent was Cockney or Lancashire, or West of England.

Several fig-trees grew beside the walled-up cavern, and I was picking the ripest of the fruit when I heard a voice from the road below calling upon me to come down.  Peering through the boughs, I saw a man seated in the smallest and most gimcrack of donkey-carts.  It was something like a grocer’s box on wheels.  The owner gave violent smacks to the plank on which he was sitting, to let me understand that there was room for another person.  I did not think there could be, but I left the figs and came down the rocks.

‘If you are going to Saint-Gery,’ said the man, ’I can take you about five kilometres on the road.’

‘But the donkey,’ I urged, ‘will lie down and roll.’

‘What, the little beast!  Not he! he will go along like an arrow.’

I accepted the invitation, and away went the donkey, making himself as much like an arrow on the wing as any ass could.  My companion, who was a handsome fellow, with a moustache that one would expect to see upon the face of a Sicilian brigand, was a cantonnier, and as he scraped out the ditches and mended the roads, his donkey browsed upon what he could find along the wayside.  In summer and winter they were inseparable companions, and had come to thoroughly understand one another.  The cantonnier confided to me that he was formerly employed in the phosphate quarries, and that he had closed his experience in this line by working three months without wages for an Englishman whose speculation turned out a failure.  Phosphate then lost its charm upon the proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to ’eat all his economies,’ and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure.  It was getting dusk when we parted.  My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work.  He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy cries.  His presence was not cheering, but I had to put up with it, for when I walked fast he ran.  He likewise left me at length to continue my way alone, and his wild cries became fainter and fainter.  Then, in the deepening dusk, two churches, one on each side of the river, began to sound the angelus.  A gleam of yellow light lingered in the western sky between two dark hills, but the clouds above and the river below were of the colour of slate.  Suddenly a bright blaze flashed across the dim and misty valley from a cottage hearth where a woman had just thrown on a faggot to boil the evening soup, and the gloom of nature was at once filled with the sentiment of home.