The young man thought that his host must be of a very careless or a very calculating disposition, to concede so little to domestic enjoyments and the pleasures of the eye; and judging, in spite of himself, by what he saw, he could not help feeling a distrust of his character.

In the mean time the farmer returned from the stables, and made him enter the house.

The inside of the farmhouse corresponded to its outside.  The whitewashed walls had no other ornament than a row of guns of all sizes; the massive furniture hardly redeemed its clumsy appearance by its great solidity.  The cleanliness was doubtful, and the absence of all minor conveniences proved that a woman’s care was wanting in the household concerns.  The young clerk learned that the farmer, in fact, lived here with no one but his two sons.

Of this, indeed, the signs were plain enough.  A table with the cloth laid, that no one had taken the trouble to clear away, was left near the window.  The plates and dishes were scattered upon it without any order, and loaded with potato-parings and half-picked bones.  Several empty bottles emitted an odor of brandy, mixed with the pungent smell of tobacco-smoke.

After seating his guest, the farmer lighted his pipe, and his two sons resumed their work by the fireside.  Now and then the silence was just broken by a short remark, answered by a word or an exclamation; and then all became as mute as before.

“From my childhood,” said the old cashier, “I had been very sensible to the impression of outward objects; later in life, reflection had taught me to study the causes of these impressions rather than to drive them away.  I set myself, then, to examine everything around me with great attention.

“Below the guns, I had remarked on entering, some wolftraps were suspended, and to one of them still hung the mangled remains of a wolf’s paw, which they had not yet taken off from the iron teeth.  The blackened chimneypiece was ornamented by an owl and a raven nailed on the wall, their wings extended, and their throats with a huge nail through each; a fox’s skin, freshly flayed, was spread before the window; and a larder hook, fixed into the principal beam, held a headless goose, whose body swayed about over our heads.

“My eyes were offended by all these details, and I turned them again upon my hosts.  The father, who sat opposite to me, only interrupted his smoking to pour out his drink, or address some reprimand to his sons.  The eldest of these was scraping a deep bucket, and the bloody scrapings, which he threw into the fire every instant, filled the room with a disagreeable fetid smell; the second son was sharpening some butcher’s knives.  I learned from a word dropped from the father that they were preparing to kill a pig the next day.

“These occupations and the whole aspect of things inside the house told of such habitual coarseness in their way of living as seemed to explain, while it formed the fitting counterpart of, the forbidding gloominess of the outside.  My astonishment by degrees changed into disgust, and my disgust into uneasiness.  I cannot detail the whole chain of ideas which succeeded one another in my imagination; but, yielding to an impulse I could not overcome, I got up, declaring I would go on my road again.