“Hush!” said Benassis, “here we are.  I will go first; follow after me.”

Both of them scaled the ladder and hid themselves in the hay, in a place from whence they could have a good view of the party below, who had not heard a sound overhead.  Little groups of women were clustered about three or four candles.  Some of them sewed, others were spinning, a good few of them were doing nothing, and sat with their heads strained forward, and their eyes fixed on an old peasant who was telling a story.  The men were standing about for the most part, or lying at full length on the trusses of hay.  Every group was absolutely silent.  Their faces were barely visible by the flickering gleams of the candles by which the women were working, although each candle was surrounded by a glass globe filled with water, in order to concentrate the light.  The thick darkness and shadow that filled the roof and all the upper part of the barn seemed still further to diminish the light that fell here and there upon the workers’ heads with such picturesque effects of light and shade.  Here, it shone full upon the bright wondering eyes and brown forehead of a little peasant maiden; and there the straggling beams brought out the outlines of the rugged brows of some of the older men, throwing up their figures in sharp relief against the dark background, and giving a fantastic appearance to their worn and weather-stained garb.  The attentive attitude of all these people and the expression on all their faces showed that they had given themselves up entirely to the pleasure of listening, and that the narrator’s sway was absolute.  It was a curious scene.  The immense influence that poetry exerts over every mind was plainly to be seen.  For is not the peasant who demands that the tale of wonder should be simple, and that the impossible should be well-nigh credible, a lover of poetry of the purest kind?

“She did not like the look of the house at all,” the peasant was saying as the two newcomers took their places where they could overhear him; “but the poor little hunchback was so tired out with carrying her bundle of hemp to market, that she went in; besides, the night had come, and she could go no further.  She only asked to be allowed to sleep there, and ate nothing but a crust of bread that she took from her wallet.  And inasmuch as the woman who kept house for the brigands knew nothing about what they had planned to do that night, she let the old woman into the house, and sent her upstairs without a light.  Our hunchback throws herself down on a rickety truckle bed, says her prayers, thinks about her hemp, and is dropping off to sleep.  But before she is fairly asleep, she hears a noise, and in walk two men carrying a lantern, and each man had a knife in his hand.  Then fear came upon her; for in those times, look you, they used to make pates of human flesh for the seigneurs, who were very fond of them.  But the old woman plucked up heart again, for she was so thoroughly