But the spectacle that next attracted my attention was a fine one indeed, a noble subject for a painter.  At the other end of the arable tract, a young man of attractive appearance was driving a superb team:  four yoke of young beasts, black-coated with tawny spots that gleamed like fire, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the great, wild eyes, the abrupt movements, the nervous, jerky way of doing their work, which shows that the yoke and goad still irritate them and that they shiver with wrath as they yield to the domination newly imposed upon them.  They were what are called oxen freshly yoked.  The man who was guiding them had to clear a field until recently used for pasturage, and filled with venerable stumps—­an athlete’s task which his energy, his youth, and his eight almost untamed beasts were hardly sufficient to accomplish.

A child of six or seven years, as beautiful as an angel, with a lamb’s fleece covering his shoulders, over his blouse, so that he resembled the little Saint John the Baptist of the painters of the Renaissance, was trudging along in the furrow beside the plough and pricking the sides of the oxen with a long, light stick, the end of which was armed with a dull goad.  The proud beasts quivered under the child’s small hand, and made the yokes and the straps about their foreheads groan, jerking the plough violently forward.  When the ploughshare struck a root, the driver shouted in a resonant voice, calling each beast by his name, but rather to soothe than to excite them; for the oxen, annoyed by the sudden resistance, started forward, digging their broad forked feet into the ground, and would have turned aside and dragged the plough across the field, had not the young man held the four leaders in check with voice and goad, while the child handled the other four.  He, too, shouted, poor little fellow, in a voice which he tried to render terrible, but which remained as sweet as his angelic face.  The whole picture was beautiful in strength and in grace:  the landscape, the man, the child, the oxen under the yoke; and, despite the mighty struggle in which the earth was conquered, there was a feeling of peace and profound tranquillity hovering over everything.  When the obstacle was surmounted and the team resumed its even, solemn progress, the ploughman, whose pretended violence was only to give his muscles a little practice and his vitality an outlet, suddenly resumed the serenity of simple souls and cast a contented glance upon his child, who turned to smile at him.  Then the manly voice of the young paterfamilias would strike up the solemn, melancholy tune which the ancient tradition of the province transmits, not to all ploughmen without distinction, but to those most expert in the art of arousing and sustaining the spirit of working-cattle.  That song, whose origin was perhaps held sacred, and to which mysterious influences seem to have been attributed formerly, is reputed even to the present day to possess