“Yet you live here all by yourself and still work for wages?” I asked. His reply was eminently characteristic. “I work for my children.” These children he told me were two grown up sons, one of them being like himself a gardener, both having work. Thus in order to hoard up a little more for two able-bodied young men, here was a bent, aged man living penuriously and alone, his only companion being a beautiful and evidently much petted donkey. I ventured to express an English view of the matter, namely, the undesirability of encouraging idleness and self-indulgence in one’s children by toiling and moiling for them in old age. He nodded his head. “You are right, all that you say is true, but so it is with me. I must work for my children.” And thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola, Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and with which we are familiarized in French criminal reports--parents and grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings. Thus also are generated in the rich and leisured classes that intense selfishness of the rising generation so movingly portrayed in M. Hervieu’s play, “La Course du Flambeau.” No one who has witnessed Mme. Réjane’s presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever forget it. On leaving, the Père A---- presented us with grapes and pears, carefully selecting the finest for his English visitor. At the gate I threw a Parthian dart. “Don’t work too hard,” I said, whereupon came the burden of his song: “One must work for one’s children.” This good neighbour could neither read nor write, a quite exceptional case in these days. Our second visit was made to a person similarly situated, but belonging to a different order. Madame B----, a widow, was also advanced in years and also lived by herself on her little property, consisting of walled-in cottage and outhouses, with straggling garden or rather orchard, garden and field in one. This good woman is what country folks in these parts call rich. I have no doubt that an English farmeress in her circumstances would have the neatest little parlour, a tidy maid to wait upon her, and most likely take afternoon tea in a black silk gown. Our hostess here wore the dress of a poor but respectable working woman. Her interior was almost as bare and primitive as that of the Boer farmhouse in the Paris Exhibition. Although between six and seven o’clock, there was no sign whatever of preparation for an evening meal. Indeed on every side things looked poverty-stricken. Not a penny had evidently been spent upon kitchen or bedrooms for years and years, the brick floor of both being bare, the furniture having done duty for generations.