hing and branding his yearling colts. Small
but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken,
than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the
open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the
morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and
catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not
give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with
an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as
its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with 'Thanase in the
saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the
young wife's nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature's
tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable
rider.

Could scholarship be finer than--or as fine as--such horsemanship? And
yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zosephine, like all the rest of
Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious,
half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody's love or
lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody's;
landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there
was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom
there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was
quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all
his learning--for he could read and write in two languages and took
the Vermilionville newspaper--and with all his books, almost an entire
mantel-shelf full--he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any
ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zosephine found her eyes, so to speak,
lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon
the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own
husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real
impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture,
she had cast it aside now--as to herself; her children--oh! yes; but
that would be by and by.

Even of pastimes and sports she saw almost none. For 'Thanase there
was, first of all, his fiddle; then _la chasse_, the chase; the
_papegaie_, or, as he called it, _pad-go_--the shooting-match; _la
galloche_, pitch-farthing; the cock-fight; the five-arpent pony-race;
and too often, also, _chin-chin_, twenty-five-cent poker, and the
gossip and glass of the roadside "store." But for Madame 'Thanase
there was on