Sometimes an informer would say
to him: 'M---- So-and-so is cutting down your wood.' 'Oh, bast! _le
pauvre_. It is cold weather!' was the reply that he would be most
likely to make. His good qualities would have ruined him had not
destiny with great discernment and charity nailed him to his little
patrimony, where he was comparatively safe.

The bees in the loft were instructive and the rats amusing, but the
fleas were neither the one nor the other--they were merely exciting.
And so it came to pass that I forsook the place, and by climbing a
little staircase cut in the rock, against which the house was built,
reached a cavern far above the roof and found at last my ideal
writing-place upon the ledge in front of it, where the mallow and the
crane's-bill crept over a patch of turf. Here the voices of the noisy
little world below were sufficiently toned down by distance. The
noisiest creatures up here were the jackdaws, which were constantly
flying in and out of the holes in the church wall that rose above me
from another and wider ledge of rock. A pair of sooty-looking
rock-swallows that had made their nest in the roof of the cavern were
much irritated by my presence, but, like the rats, they became
reconciled to it. The little martins, always trustful, never hesitated
from the first to fly into the cave and drink from the dripping water.
When the dusk came on, the bats, which had been hanging by their
winged heels all day in dusky holes and corners, fluttered out one
after another, and went zigzagging until they were lost to sight over
the old stone roofs on which the moss had blackened.

A little before the bats came out was the time when to do aught else
but let the sight feast upon the beauty of the rocky little world
bounded by the walls of the narrow gorge would have been literally to
waste the golden moments. Then it was that the naked crags, which
caught the almost level rays of the setting sun, grew brighter and
more brilliantly coruscating, until they seemed ready to melt from the
intensity of their own heat; then this fiery golden colour would
slowly fade and wane into misty purple tones, which lingered long when
there was no more sun. Why did it linger? All the sky that I could see
was blue, and of deepening tone. But the most wonderful sight was yet
to come, when, while the valley was fast darkening, and along the
banks of the Alzou's dry channel the walnut-trees stood like dark
spectres of uncertain form,