their own
country, where they could feel happy again.

When they arrived under the trees where the roads from Colombes and
from Chatou cross, they would take off their heavy helmets and wipe
their foreheads. They always halted on the Bezons bridge to look at the
Seine, and would remain there two or three minutes, bent double,
leaning on the parapet.

Sometimes they would gaze out over the great basin of Argenteuil, where
the skiffs might be seen scudding, with their white, careening sails,
recalling perhaps the look of the Breton waters, the harbor of Vanne,
near which they lived, and the fishing-boats standing out across the
Morbihan to the open sea.

Just beyond the Seine they bought their provisions from a sausage
merchant, a baker, and a wine-seller. A piece of blood-pudding, four
sous' worth of bread, and a liter of "petit bleu" constituted the
provisions, which they carried off in their handkerchiefs. After they
had left Bezons they traveled slowly and began to talk.

In front of them a barren plain studded with clumps of trees led to the
wood, to the little wood which had seemed to them to resemble the one
at Kermarivan. Grainfields and hayfields bordered the narrow path,
which lost itself in the young greenness of the crops, and Jean
Kerderen would always say to Luc le Ganidec:

"It looks like it does near Plounivon."

"Yes; exactly."

Side by side they strolled, their souls filled with vague memories of
their own country, with awakened images as naive as the pictures on the
colored broadsheets which you buy for a penny. They kept on
recognizing, as it were, now a corner of a field, a hedge, a bit of
moorland, now a crossroad, now a granite cross. Then, too, they would
always stop beside a certain landmark, a great stone, because it looked
something like the cromlech at Locneuven.

Every Sunday on arriving at the first clump of trees Luc le Ganidec
would cut a switch, a hazel switch, and begin gently to peel off the
bark, thinking meanwhile of the folk at home. Jean Kerderen carried the
provisions.

From time to time Luc would mention a name, or recall some deed of
their childhood in a few brief words, which caused long thoughts. And
their own country, their dear, distant country, recaptured them little
by little, seizing on their imaginations, and sending to them from afar
her shapes, her sounds, her well-known prospects, her odors--odors of
the green lands where the salt sea-air was blowing.

No