especial, the lane where Athenais puts her arm out of the side window of the rustic carriage and gathers May from the overarching hedge,—­that lane with its startled blackbirds, and humming insects, and limpid water, and swaying water-plants, and shelving gravel, and yellow wagtails hopping, half-pert, half-frightened, on the sand,—­that lane with its rushes, cresses, and mint below, its honeysuckle and traveller’s-joy above,—­how gladly might one give all that strangely English picture in English, if the charm of Madame Sand’s language did not here defy translation!  Let us try something less difficult, and yet something where we may still have her in this her beloved world of “simplicity, and sky, and fields and trees, and peasant life,—­peasant life looked at, by preference, on its good and sound side.” Voyez donc la simplicite, vous autres, voyez le ciel et les champs, et les arbres, et les paysans, surtout dans ce qu’ils ont de bon et de vrai.

The introduction to La Mare au Diable will give us what we want.  George Sand has been looking at an engraving of Holbein’s Laborer. [321] An old thick-set peasant, in rags, is driving his plough in the midst of a field.  All around spreads a wild landscape, dotted with a few poor huts.  The sun is setting behind a hill; the day of toil is nearly over.  It has been a hard one; the ground is rugged and stony, the laborer’s horses are but skin and bone, weak and exhausted.  There is but one alert figure, the skeleton Death, who with a whip skips nimbly along at the horses’ side and urges the team.  Under the picture is a quotation in old French, to the effect that after the laborer’s life of travail and service, in which he has to gain his bread by the sweat of his brow, here comes Death to fetch him away.  And from so rude a life does Death take him, says George Sand, that Death is hardly unwelcome; and in another composition by Holbein, where men of almost every condition,—­ popes, sovereigns, lovers, gamblers, monks, soldiers,—­are taunted with their fear of Death and do indeed see his approach with terror, Lazarus alone is easy and composed, and sitting on his dunghill at the rich man’s door, tells Death that he does not dread him.

With her thoughts full of Holbein’s mournful picture, George Sand goes out into the fields of her own Berry:—­

“My walk was by the border of a field which some peasants were getting ready for being sown presently.  The space to be ploughed was wide, as in Holbein’s picture.  The landscape was vast also; the great lines of green which it contained were just touched with russet by the approach of autumn; on the rich brown soil recent rain had left, in a good many furrows, lines of water, which shone in the sun like silver threads.  The day was clear and soft, and the earth gave out a light smoke where it had been freshly laid open by the ploughshare.  At the top of the field an old man, whose broad back and severe face