by all the collected humus, concealed pestiferous marshes, depths of liquid mud; and amongst the expanses of verdure spread over the glaucous immensity to the very horizon there were only narrow stretches of firm ground with which the traveller must be acquainted if he would avoid disappearing for ever.  One night the man sank down as far as his waist.  At each effort he made to extricate himself the mud threatened to rise to his mouth.  Then he remained quite still for nearly a couple of hours; and when the moon rose he was fortunately able to catch hold of a branch of a tree above his head.  By the time he reached a human dwelling his hands and feet were bruised and bleeding, swollen with poisonous stings.  He presented such a pitiable, famished appearance that those who saw him were afraid of him.  They tossed him some food fifty yards away from the house, and the master of it kept guard over his door with a loaded gun.”

Florent stopped, his voice choked by emotion, and his eyes gazing blankly before him.  For some minutes he had seemed to be speaking to himself alone.  Little Pauline, who had grown drowsy, was lying in his arms with her head thrown back, though striving to keep her wondering eyes open.  And Quenu, for his part, appeared to be getting impatient.

“Why, you stupid!” he shouted to Leon, “don’t you know how to hold a skin yet?  What do you stand staring at me for?  It’s the skin you should look at, not me!  There, hold it like that, and don’t move again!”

With his right hand Leon was raising a long string of sausage-skin, at one end of which a very wide funnel was inserted; while with his left hand he coiled the black-pudding round a metal bowl as fast as Quenu filled the funnel with big spoonfuls of the meat.  The latter, black and steaming, flowed through the funnel, gradually inflating the skin, which fell down again, gorged to repletion and curving languidly.  As Quenu had removed the pot from the range both he and Leon stood out prominently, he broad visaged, and the lad slender of profile, in the burning glow which cast over their pale faces and white garments a flood of rosy light.

Lisa and Augustine watched the filling of the skin with great interest, Lisa especially; and she in her turn found fault with Leon because he nipped the skin too tightly with his fingers, which caused knots to form, she said.  When the skin was quite full, Quenu let it slip gently into a pot of boiling water; and seemed quite easy in his mind again, for now nothing remained but to leave it to boil.

“And the man—­go on about the man!” murmured Pauline, opening her eyes, and surprised at no longer hearing the narrative.

Florent rocked her on his knee, and resumed his story in a slow, murmuring voice, suggestive of that of a nurse singing an infant to sleep.