enfolding him with
their affection, and were unwilling to let him be out of their sight.

When he was five years old some mountebanks passed through the country
and set up their tent in the town hall square.

Jean, who had seen them pass by, made his escape from the house, and
after his father had made a long search for him, he found him among the
learned goats and trick dogs, uttering shouts of laughter and sitting on
the knees of an old clown.

Three days later, just as they were sitting down to dinner, the
wheelwright and his wife noticed that their son was not in the house.
They looked for him in the garden, and as they did not find him, his
father went out into the road and shouted at the top of his voice,
"Jean!"

Night came on. A brown vapor arose making distant objects look still
farther away and giving them a dismal, weird appearance. Three tall
pines, close at hand, seemed to be weeping. Still there was no reply, but
the air appeared to be full of indistinct sighing. The father listened
for some time, thinking he heard a sound first in one direction, then in
another, and, almost beside himself, he ran, out into the night, calling
incessantly "Jean! Jean!"

He ran along thus until daybreak, filling the, darkness with his shouts,
terrifying stray animals, torn by a terrible anguish and fearing that he
was losing his mind. His wife, seated on the stone step of their home,
sobbed until morning.

They did not find their son. They both aged rapidly in their inconsolable
sorrow. Finally they sold their house and set out to search together.

They inquired of the shepherds on the hillsides, of the tradesmen passing
by, of the peasants in the villages and of the authorities in the towns.
But their boy had been lost a long time and no one knew anything about
him. He had probably forgotten his own name by this time and also the
name of his village, and his parents wept in silence, having lost hope.

Before long their money came to an end, and they worked out by the day in
the farms and inns, doing the most menial work, eating what was left from
the tables, sleeping on the ground and suffering from cold. Then as they
became enfeebled by hard work no one would employ them any longer, and
they were forced to beg along the high roads. They accosted passers-by in
an entreating voice and with sad, discouraged faces; they begged a morsel
of bread from the harvesters who were dining around a tree in the fields
at noon, a