r lover dressed her,"
Etc., etc.

As Barbette reached this verse of the song, where Pille-Miche had begun
it, she was entering the courtyard of her home; her tongue suddenly
stiffened, she stood still, and a great cry, quickly repressed, came
from her gaping lips.

"What is it, mother?" said the child.

"Walk alone," she cried, pulling her hand away and pushing him roughly;
"you have neither father nor mother."

The child, who was rubbing his shoulder and weeping, suddenly caught
sight of the thing on the nail; his childlike face kept the nervous
convulsion his crying had caused, but he was silent. He opened his
eyes wide, and gazed at the head of his father with a stupid look which
betrayed no emotion; then his face, brutalized by ignorance, showed
savage curiosity. Barbette again took his hand, grasped it violently,
and dragged him into the house. When Pille-Miche and Marche-a-Terre
threw their victim on the bench one of his shoes, dropping off, fell on
the floor beneath his neck and was afterward filled with blood. It was
the first thing that met the widow's eye.

"Take off your shoe," said the mother to her son. "Put your foot in
that. Good. Remember," she cried, in a solemn voice, "your father's
shoe; never put on your own without remembering how the Chouans filled
it with his blood, and _kill the Chouans_!"

She swayed her head with so convulsive an action that the meshes of
her black hair fell upon her neck and gave a sinister expression to her
face.

"I call Saint-Labre to witness," she said, "that I vow you to the Blues.
You shall be a soldier to avenge your father. Kill, kill the _Chouans_,
and do as I do. Ha! they've taken the head of my man, and I am going to
give that of the Gars to the Blues."

She sprang at a bound on the bed, seized a little bag of money from a
hiding-place, took the hand of the astonished little boy, and dragged
him after her without giving him time to put on his shoe, and was on her
way to Fougeres rapidly, without once turning her head to look at
the home she abandoned. When they reached the summit of the rocks of
Saint-Sulpice Barbette set fire to the pile of fagots, and the boy
helped her to pile on the green gorse, damp with hoarfrost, to make the
smoke more dense.

"That fire will last longer than your father, longer than I, longer than
the Gars," said Barbette, in a savage voice.

While the widow of Galope-Chopine and her son with his bloody foot stood
watching, t