And he turned on his crutches to the next house, where he was received in the same fashion.

The women declared to one another as they stood at their doors: 

“We can’t feed that lazy brute all the year round!”

And yet the “lazy brute” needed food every day.

He had exhausted Saint-Hilaire, Varville and Les Billettes without getting a single copper or so much as a dry crust.  His only hope was in Tournolles, but to reach this place he would have to walk five miles along the highroad, and he felt so weary that he could hardly drag himself another yard.  His stomach and his pocket were equally empty, but he started on his way.

It was December and a cold wind blew over the fields and whistled through the bare branches of the trees; the clouds careered madly across the black, threatening sky.  The cripple dragged himself slowly along, raising one crutch after the other with a painful effort, propping himself on the one distorted leg which remained to him.

Now and then he sat down beside a ditch for a few moments’ rest.  Hunger was gnawing his vitals, and in his confused, slow-working mind he had only one idea-to eat-but how this was to be accomplished he did not know.  For three hours he continued his painful journey.  Then at last the sight of the trees of the village inspired him with new energy.

The first peasant he met, and of whom he asked alms, replied: 

“So it’s you again, is it, you old scamp?  Shall I never be rid of you?”

And “Bell” went on his way.  At every door he got nothing but hard words.  He made the round of the whole village, but received not a halfpenny for his pains.

Then he visited the neighboring farms, toiling through the muddy land, so exhausted that he could hardly raise his crutches from the ground.  He met with the same reception everywhere.  It was one of those cold, bleak days, when the heart is frozen and the temper irritable, and hands do not open either to give money or food.

When he had visited all the houses he knew, “Bell” sank down in the corner of a ditch running across Chiquet’s farmyard.  Letting his crutches slip to the ground, he remained motionless, tortured by hunger, but hardly intelligent enough to realize to the full his unutterable misery.

He awaited he knew not what, possessed with that vague hope which persists in the human heart in spite of everything.  He awaited in the corner of the farmyard in the biting December wind, some mysterious aid from Heaven or from men, without the least idea whence it was to arrive.  A number of black hens ran hither and thither, seeking their food in the earth which supports all living things.  Ever now and then they snapped up in their beaks a grain of corn or a tiny insect; then they continued their slow, sure search for nutriment.

“Bell” watched them at first without thinking of anything.  Then a thought occurred rather to his stomach than to his mind—­the thought that one of those fowls would be good to eat if it were cooked over a fire of dead wood.