followed by twofold
mourning.

"A pretty fellow this!" thought Hulot; "he looks to me like the emissary
of men who mean to argue with their muskets."

Having growled these words between his teeth, the commandant cast
his eyes in turn from the man to the valley, from the valley to the
detachment, from the detachment to the steep acclivities on the right of
the road, the ridges of which were covered with the broom and gorse of
Brittany; then he suddenly turned them full on the stranger, whom he
subjected to a mute interrogation, which he ended at last by roughly
demanding, "Where do you come from?"

His eager, piercing eye strove to detect the secrets of that
impenetrable face, which never changed from the vacant, torpid
expression in which a peasant when doing nothing wraps himself.

"From the country of the Gars," replied the man, without showing any
uneasiness.

"Your name?"

"Marche-a-Terre."

"Why do you call yourself by your Chouan name in defiance of the law?"

Marche-a-Terre, to use the name he gave to himself, looked at the
commandant with so genuine an air of stupidity that the soldier believed
the man had not understood him.

"Do you belong to the recruits from Fougeres?"

To this inquiry Marche-a-Terre replied by the bucolic "I don't know,"
the hopeless imbecility of which puts an end to all inquiry. He seated
himself by the roadside, drew from his smock a few pieces of thin, black
buckwheat-bread,--a national delicacy, the dismal delights of which none
but a Breton can understand,--and began to eat with stolid indifference.
There seemed such a total absence of all human intelligence about the
man that the officers compared him in turn to the cattle browsing in
the valley pastures, to the savages of America, or the aboriginal
inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope. Deceived by his behavior, the
commandant himself was about to turn a deaf ear to his own misgivings,
when, casting a last prudence glance on the man whom he had taken for
the herald of an approaching carnage, he suddenly noticed that the
hair, the smock, and the goatskin leggings of the stranger were full of
thorns, scraps of leaves, and bits of trees and bushes, as though this
Chouan had lately made his way for a long distance through thickets and
underbrush. Hulot looked significantly at his adjutant Gerard who stood
beside him, pressed his hand firmly, and said in a low voice: "We came
for wool, but we shall go back sheared."

The of