I have learned since that the ploughman, who was our first man, earned only thirty francs a year. I leave you to judge of the rest. It was a poor country, and one could enjoy all the comforts which it afforded with an income of twelve hundred francs a year. One of our chief pleasures consisted in the care of our garden. My mother had a little bed in which roses, tulips, pansies, and daisies grew in abundance. She was particularly fond of mignonette and honey-suckle. The hedge around our kitchen-garden was covered with honey-suckle, elder, and a whole family of sweet-smelling creepers, over which our bees hovered and buzzed. There was seldom a day when we did not walk around the garden once, and that was quite a journey. We had another habit which I do not understand as well, and which consisted in walking around Colas' field every day after dinner; that is, at one o'clock. We first went down a hollow road where the mud was not wanting when it had rained. The flowers were not wanting there either in summer; we walked under a real vault of them. This road led to the blacksmith's shop, where I always found something to admire,--the great bellows, the incandescent iron, the sparks flying from the furnace like joyous fireworks. Next to the blacksmith's shop stood Marion's house,--the last house at the end of the village. Marion was a girl of twenty who had lost her mother when she was eighteen. Everybody had advised her to go into service; but she had preferred to engage herself to my mother as a seamstress, by the year. Her house--"Marion's house," as it was always spoken of--belonged to her. It was not a great dowry. It consisted of two rooms under a thatched roof, and a little yard where she raised her chickens. She had been warned against the dangers of living alone at her age, and in a comparatively isolated place; but she was a fearless girl and somewhat unsociable. She had discovered, I do not know where,--in one of the neighboring farms, perhaps,--a widow who was only too happy to occupy one of her rooms gratuitously, and who was a companion and a protection to her when she came home after her day's work. Colas' field began at Marion's door. It was surely not what one would call beautiful. We walked straight before us, and got back to our starting-point at the end of an hour without having seen anything but apple-trees and furrows. On Sunday when this task had been accomplished, we found Marion in her yard among her chickens, waiting to go to vespers with us. I always took her hand, and she told me stories of Poulpiquets.