hins played and tumbled
about from morning till night. The two eldest were six years old, and the
youngest were about fifteen months; the marriages, and afterward the
births, having taken place nearly simultaneously in both families.

The two mothers could hardly distinguish their own offspring among the
lot, and as for the fathers, they were altogether at sea. The eight names
danced in their heads; they were always getting them mixed up; and when
they wished to call one child, the men often called three names before
getting the right one.

The first of the two cottages, as you came up from the bathing beach,
Rolleport, was occupied by the Tuvaches, who had three girls and one boy;
the other house sheltered the Vallins, who had one girl and three boys.

They all subsisted frugally on soup, potatoes and fresh air. At seven
o'clock in the morning, then at noon, then at six o'clock in the evening,
the housewives got their broods together to give them their food, as the
gooseherds collect their charges. The children were seated, according to
age, before the wooden table, varnished by fifty years of use; the mouths
of the youngest hardly reaching the level of the table. Before them was
placed a bowl filled with bread, soaked in the water in which the
potatoes had been boiled, half a cabbage and three onions; and the whole
line ate until their hunger was appeased. The mother herself fed the
smallest.

A small pot roast on Sunday was a feast for all; and the father on this
day sat longer over the meal, repeating: "I wish we could have this every
day."

One afternoon, in the month of August, a phaeton stopped suddenly in
front of the cottages, and a young woman, who was driving the horses,
said to the gentleman sitting at her side:

"Oh, look at all those children, Henri! How pretty they are, tumbling
about in the dust, like that!"

The man did not answer, accustomed to these outbursts of admiration,
which were a pain and almost a reproach to him. The young woman
continued:

"I must hug them! Oh, how I should like to have one of them--that
one there--the little tiny one!"

Springing down from the carriage, she ran toward the children, took one
of the two youngest--a Tuvache child--and lifting it up in her
arms, she kissed him passionately on his dirty cheeks, on his tousled
hair daubed with earth, and on his little hands, with which he fought
vigorously, to get away from the caresses which displeased him.

Then she