The old doctor was silent. He took up the brandy-bottle and poured out
another glass. He held it up to the lamp, and the light streaming through
it imparted to the liquid the amber color of molten topaz. With one gulp
he swallowed the treacherous drink.

THE FARMER'S WIFE

Said the Baron Rene du Treilles to me:

"Will you come and open the hunting season with me at my farm at
Marinville? I shall be delighted if you will, my dear boy. In the first
place, I am all alone. It is rather a difficult ground to get at, and the
place I live in is so primitive that I can invite only my most intimate
friends."

I accepted his invitation, and on Saturday we set off on the train going
to Normandy. We alighted at a station called Almivare, and Baron Rene,
pointing to a carryall drawn by a timid horse and driven by a big
countryman with white hair, said:

"Here is our equipage, my dear boy."

The driver extended his hand to his landlord, and the baron pressed it
warmly, asking:

"Well, Maitre Lebrument, how are you?"

"Always the same, M'sieu le Baron."

We jumped into this swinging hencoop perched on two enormous wheels, and
the young horse, after a violent swerve, started into a gallop, pitching
us into the air like balls. Every fall backward on the wooden bench gave
me the most dreadful pain.

The peasant kept repeating in his calm, monotonous voice:

"There, there! All right all right, Moutard, all right!"

But Moutard scarcely heard, and kept capering along like a goat.

Our two dogs behind us, in the empty part of the hencoop, were standing
up and sniffing the air of the plains, where they scented game.

The baron gazed with a sad eye into the distance at the vast Norman
landscape, undulating and melancholy, like an immense English park, where
the farmyards, surrounded by two or four rows of trees and full of
dwarfed apple trees which hid the houses, gave a vista as far as the eye
could see of forest trees, copses and shrubbery such as landscape
gardeners look for in laying out the boundaries of princely estates.

And Rene du Treilles suddenly exclaimed:

"I love this soil; I have my very roots in it."

He was a pure Norman, tall and strong, with a slight paunch, and of the
old race of adventurers who went to found kingdoms on the shores of every
ocean. He was about fifty years of age, ten years less perhaps than the
farmer who was driving us.

The latter was a lean peasant, all skin and bone, one