I reached the village of Prudhomat just as the storm burst over it, and took shelter in a small inn, which, like most of those in the country, had its room for the public upstairs.  Two women who were there made the sign of the cross each time the lightning flashed—­a widespread custom of the French peasantry; but a couple of men who were eating salad and bread paid no heed to the furious cannonade that was kept up by the darkened heavens.  It was four o’clock, and they were having their gouter.  The peasants of the Quercy do not live on the fat of the land; but they generally have five meals a day, two more than the middle-class French.  They begin with soup at a very early hour in the morning; then they have their dinner about ten, which is chiefly soup; at three or four they have a gouter of bread and cheese, salad or fruit; and at six or seven they have their supper, which is soup again.

The old woman who sat near the window worked diligently with her distaff laden with hemp, except when the flashing lightning made her stop to raise her thin hand to her forehead.  She was twisting the thread from which the sheets of the country are made.  They are coarse, but they last longer than the hands that work the hemp, and descend from mother to daughter.

More than two hours I waited in this auberge while the rain fell in torrents, the lightning blazed, and the thunder crashed.  The whole sky was the colour of slate.  When at length a line of bright light appeared in the western sky, I could curb my impatience no longer, and, hoisting my pack, I was soon on the road to Carennac.

A little beyond the village I passed a gipsy encampment ranged along the side of the highway on a strip of waste land.  There were no tents; but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over with tattered and dirty canvas.  They were tents on wheels.  Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust.  Small portable stoves—­alas! not the traditional fire with three stakes set in the ground and tied at the top, with the pot swinging therefrom—­had been lighted outside the caravans, and gipsy women were making the evening soup.  Bright-eyed, shock-headed, uncombed, unwashed, but exceedingly happy gipsy children were tumbling over one another on the wet turf, showing so much of their brown skin between their rags that they would have been more comfortable and quite as decent had they been naked.  A hideous old man, merely skin and bones, sitting nose and knees together upon a sack, did not take my curiosity in good part, but glared at me morosely.  The younger men of this interesting community were elsewhere—­perhaps mending saucepans, or reassuring ducks alarmed by the thunderstorm.  A musician of the party must have been kept in by the bad weather, for from one of the caravans came the diabolic screech of a wheezing concertina that had got rid of all its ideals and dreams of distinction.