the last century, who had divided everything he had among his four
children, went to live with each in turn for three months in the year.
As he left the oldest to go to the home of a younger brother, one of
his friends asked him, 'Well, are you satisfied with the arrangement?'
'Faith! yes,' the old man answered; 'they have treated me as if I had
been their own child.' That answer of his seemed so remarkable to an
officer then stationed at Grenoble, that he repeated it in more than one
Parisian salon. That officer was the celebrated moralist Vauvenargues,
and in this way the beautiful saying came to the knowledge of another
writer named Chamfort. Ah! still more forcible phrases are often struck
out among us, but they lack a historian worthy of them."

"I have come across Moravians and Lollards in Bohemia and Hungary," said
Genestas. "They are a kind of people something like your mountaineers,
good folk who endure the sufferings of war with angelic patience."

"Men living under simple and natural conditions are bound to be almost
alike in all countries. Sincerity of life takes but one form. It is true
that a country life often extinguishes thought of a wider kind; but evil
propensities are weakened and good qualities are developed by it. In
fact, the fewer the numbers of the human beings collected together in a
place, the less crime, evil thinking, and general bad behavior will
be found in it. A pure atmosphere counts for a good deal in purity of
morals."

The two horsemen, who had been climbing the stony road at a foot pace,
now reached the level space of which Benassis had spoken. It is a strip
of land lying round about the base of a lofty mountain peak, a bare
surface of rock with no growth of any kind upon it; deep clefts are
riven in its sheer inaccessible sides. The gray crest of the summit
towers above the ledge of fertile soil which lies around it, a domain
sometimes narrower, sometimes wider, and altogether about a hundred
acres in extent. Here, through a vast break in the line of the hills to
the south, the eye sees French Maurienne, Dauphine, the crags of Savoy,
and the far-off mountains of the Lyonnais. Genestas was gazing from this
point, over a land that lay far and wide in the spring sunlight, when
there arose the sound of a wailing cry.

"Let us go on," said Benassis; "the wail for the dead has begun, that is
the name they give to this part of the funeral rites."

On the western slope of the mountain p