ree, and took snuff. His eyes
twinkled. Clearly he expected good sport, and I gathered that this was
not the first of Ambialet's social difficulties to be brought up to the
Priory for solution.

But for the moment both disputants hung back. The woman--an old crone,
with a face like a carved nutcracker--dropped an obeisance and stood with
her eyes fixed on the ground. The man shifted his weight from foot to
foot while he glanced furtively from one to the other of us. I recognised
him for Ambialet's only baker, a black-avised fellow on the youthful side
of forty. Clearly, the grave dignity of Pere Philibert abashed them.
"_Mais allez, donc! Allez!_" cried the Curd, much as one starts a team of
horses.

Pere Philibert turned slowly on his heel, and, waving a hand once more
toward the river, continued his discourse as though it had not been
interrupted.

"One might say almost the whole world cannot show its like! To be sure,
the historian Herodotus tells us that, when Babylon stood in danger of the
Medes, Queen Nitocris applied herself to dig new channels for the
Euphrates to make it run crookedly. And in one place she made it wind so
that travellers down the river came thrice to the same village on three
successive days."

"_Te-te!_" interrupted Brother Marc Antoine, with a chuckle. "Wake up,
Zephirine--wake up, old lady, and listen to this." Zephirine, smitten
affectionately on the ham, answered only with a short squeal like a
bagpipe, and buried her snout deeper in the grass.

"I like that," the old man went on. "To think of travelling down a river
three days' journey, and putting up each night at the same _auberge!_
_Vieux drole d'Herodote!_ But does he really pitch that yarn, my father?"

"The village, if I remember, was called Arderica, and doubtless its
inhabitants were proud of it. Yet we of Ambialet have a better right to
be proud, since the wonder that encircles us is not of man's making but a
miracle of God: although,"--and here Pere Philibert swung about and fixed
his eyes on the baker--"our local pride in Ambialet and its history, and
its institutions and its immemorial customs, are of no moment to
M. Champollion, who comes, I think, from Rodez or thereabouts."

In an instant the old woman had seized on this cue.

"_Te!_ Listen, then, to what the good father calls you!" she shrilled,
advancing on the baker and snapping finger and thumb under his nose;
"an interloper, a scoundrel from the