on a
pinch of oatmeal. It is the law of necessity, the balance of economy;
human fuel must be used up that the machine of the world may spin on;
but it is not, perhaps, marvellous that the living fuel is sometimes
unreconciled to that symmetrical rule of waste and repair, of consumer
and consumed.

* * *

It is many centuries since Caius Gracchus called the mercantile classes
to aid the people against the patricians, and found too late that they
were deadlier oppressors than all the optimates; but the error still
goes on, and the moneymakers churn it into gold, as they churned it then
into the Asiatic revenues and the senatorial amulets.

* * *

The love of a people is the most sublime crown that can rest on the brow
of any man, but the love of a mob is a mongrel that fawns and slavers
one moment, to rend and tear the next.

_FOLLE-FARINE._

In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and corn-lands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen. Few of the
people could read, and fewer still could write. They knew nothing but
what their priests and politicians told them to believe. They went to
their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock crew: they went to
mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and to the
conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood that there
was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the best market
for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins. Their brains were
as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though their lives were
content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into
the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain
on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped
through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a
blessing at seed-time on their bleak, black fallows.

The beauty and the faith of the old mediaeval life were with them still;
and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and cruelty likewise.

They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest, and
amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour,
of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism
and characterless monotony of modern cities.

But they believed in sorcery and in devi