To see us sitting together in the woods in the calm of these fine summer days, one would never imagine what our youth had been, what life we had lived, nor what terrible scenes there had been between us formerly, when first our two natures, very different and very alike, had come in conflict one with the other. Every evening before we go to bed, we play with little Pierre a Toulven game, amusing enough, which consists in holding one another by the chin and reciting, without laughing, a long rigmarole: "By the beard of Minette I hold you. The first of us two who shall laugh . . . etc." At this game little Pierre is always caught. After that come the gymnastics. Yves goes through the performance with his son, turning him over, making him "go about," head down, legs in the air, at arm's length, then raising him very high. "Tell me, little Pierre, when will you have arms like mine? Tell me! Oh, never; never arms like yours, father; I shall not suffer hardship enough for that, I am sure." And when Yves, dishevelled, tired from having romped so much, says, as he readjusts his clothes, in his most serious way: "Now then, little Pierre has finished his gymnastics for the present," little Pierre comes to me with that smile which always gets for him what he wants: "It is your turn, godfather; come!" And the gymnastics begin again. CHAPTER CI The pendulum of time, inexorable, swings on. In a few hours I shall have to leave, and soon my brother Yves will depart also, both of us for distant parts, for the unknown. It is the last day, the last evening. Yves, little Pierre and I are on our way to the cottage of the old Keremenens, where I am to say good-bye to grandmother Marianne. She lives alone, now, under her moss-grown roof, under the spreading vault of the great oaks. Pierre Kerbras and Anne, who were married in the spring, are building in the village a proper house in granite, like that of Yves. All the children have departed. Poor little cottage in which the white coifs and collarettes moved about so joyously on the day of the baptism! All that is over; now, the cottage is empty and silent. We sit down on the old oak benches, resting our elbows on the table on which the great baptismal feast was served. The old grandmother is on a stool, spinning at her distaff, her head bowed, looking already decrepit and forlorn. Although the sun is not yet very low, inside the cottage it is dark. Around us, none but old-fashioned things, poor and primitive. Large rosaries are hung on the rough granite of the walls; in corners, lost in shadow, one sees the oak logs amassed for the winter, and old household utensils, blackened and dusty, in ancient and simple forms. Never had we realized so clearly that all this is of the past and far from us. It is the old Brittany of an earlier time, almost dead.