Sometimes _la vieille_--for she was _la vieille_ from the very day that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned them loose in the dooryard--sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement of seeing her _vieux_ catching 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.