f a
marriage-portion. All these things are at an end; and why continue the
form of that which no longer has a substance?

"Sometimes a chord of the music steals out into the fields and strikes
upon my ear; but it is only the braying of the grand trumpet that
becomes thus distinguishable. Like me, the peasants here are beyond the
reach of the harmonies produced by the intellectual efforts of
humanity: not until the great trumpet brays or the bass-drum rattles
does a solitary link attach them to the mighty chain, and, for a space,
they keep step with the pace of time. Of the gentle adagio and the more
intricate harmonies they know nothing.

* * * * *

[Illustration: Spots of ground are always to be found in which no man
has a property.]

"It is well that spots of ground are always to be found in which,
strictly speaking, no man has a property, and where the poor may pluck
their bundles of grass without molestation. Such are the steep banks,
cliffs, gulches, and so on. And where even the poor can no longer find
a footing, the goat--the companion of the needy--makes her way and
picks a scented herb or an aromatic twig.

* * * * *

"On 'wood-days' the poor are allowed to appropriate the dry boughs of
the green trees. I have read somewhere that kind Nature herself
instituted this traditional charity, and throws to the poor the crumbs
of her laden board. The poor and the dry sticks.

* * * * *

"The weeds in the corn-fields are also no man's property until the poor
take them away and convert them into nutritious food. Do you ask, of
what use are weeds? Perhaps many other things should be judged by the
same rule."

These leaves were the product of three months of comparative solitude.
His habit of writing when abroad had been discovered, and had subjected
him to various uncharitable suspicions. As the reader may have divined,
many of them were but the answers given by the peasants to questions on
matters very familiar to them, and indeed to everybody except the very
learned men of learned Germany. The villagers were at their wits' end.
They could not conceive how any one could be ignorant of these matters.

Those who travel afoot must have noticed the demeanor of peasants when
asked the way to a place in the immediate neighborhood. At first they
suspect that a joke is being played upon them; and then they give an