accusation, but the whole village takes it up joyfully: "Thief! Thief!" So the gipsy-woman, who, as it chanced, has stolen nothing, is hounded out of the commune with sticks and stones and objurgations by those who had themselves appropriated her old donkey-cart piecemeal. "A bit of rusty iron whizzed past her as she crossed the bridge. It may once have served as her donkey's shoe." Such is the tale: a sample of many in _Au Fil des Jours_. Irony and realism are not wanting, nor yet the grimly picturesque, but the reader is left thinking: "What a little gem this would be if it were told by Maupassant, or some other master of the _conte_!" Certainly M. Clemenceau has something else to do than tell _contes_! But his literary material is so fine that it is his own fault if we expect the very best of him. As it is, he does not take the trouble to cut the story out clearly from the matrix of thought and memories which enfolded it in his own mind. The effect on the reader is, one might say, a little vague and murmurous, like some tale half-heard in a crowd. It is a strange thing that the countryside, Nature, the pure and never-failing spring of inspiration for poetry and human delight, should turn so different a countenance towards those who live with her, year out and year in, winning sustenance for us all from her broad and often ungenial breast. Our Mother Earth is an iron taskmaster to the tillers of the soil grinding out their youth and strength, bowing their eyes to their labour, so that all her beauty passes them by unseen. Either Nature keeps her charms jealously for the untroubled mind and the leisured eye, or else all the beauty that we see in her is borrowed, a glamour lent by some immaterial force--not ours, perhaps, but certainly not her own. Be this as it may, in the _Embuscades de la Vie_ M. Clemenceau beholds and describes the careless, endless, natural beauty amid which the peasant-lives that he sketches for us are set; but these themselves are often as ugly as bare stone, and the men and women are hard and close-fisted with one another mainly because the earth is so grudging to them. These stories are the most clear-cut of all Clemenceau's essays in fiction. They are not exactly _contes_, either: they are the discoveries, one might say, of Clemenceau in his ancestral character as the descendant of a line of doctors and landowners who worked for generations among the small bourgeois and the tillers of the soil. How he knows them! and--if French fiction is to be believed--how unchangeable they are! Since the bourgeois gained his freedom in the great Revolution by using the arm of the sans-culotte, what a grip he has kept upon his possession! and how much dearer to him his property is than anything else in the world! Clemenceau does but take up the theme of Balzac and others when he describes provincial France and its twin gods, money and the land--money which compels