The congregation left the church. The torrent, which had rushed down the hill, had in some places furrowed the graves and exposed the dead. The grass was laid flat, and much of it was buried in silt. Every wall and eave dripped, and the valley of the Charentonne lay under water. CHAPTER V. Matthias André did not join the procession. He had been to mass in the morning, for the Assumption was a day of obligation. And now he sat smoking bad tobacco out of an old brown clay pipe, on the seat before his door, facing due north, towards Bernay; there was a corn-field on his right, cut off from the Isle of Swallows by a rivulet of water--a field he had ploughed whilst his daughter Gabrielle drove the horses, which he had sown with his own hands, and which he had reaped. Gabrielle had bound the sheaves after him, and now the shocks stood in goodly array, waiting to be garnered. They had been waiting thus twelve days. The harvest was late this year, owing to the cold spring. Much corn was down in the country, and the tithe-cart of the monastery had been round to farm after farm, and had come last to his. He did not dare to remove a sheaf till the Abbey had taken its tenth; and after the monks came the revenue officers, taking their twentieth. What the palmer-worm had left, the locust devoured. Now came the feast-day, on which all work ceased, so the good wheat remained a thirteenth day unstacked. Sullen, with downcast eyes, sat the peasant without his coat, but in his red velvetine waistcoat, drawing long whiffs from his pipe, and blowing them leisurely through his nostrils. Beside him sat a little wiry brown man, with coarse serge suit of snuff-brown, face and hands, stockings and cap, to match. His eyes were sharp and eager. This was Etienne Percenez, the colporteur. ‘You have not joined the procession, Matthias, my friend,’ said the little man, filling a pipe. ‘For five and forty years I have supplicated God, our Lady, and the Saints, to assist me in my poverty, and the answers to my prayers have been doled out in such scant measure, that I have almost given up prayer,’ answered André. ‘You must work as well as pray,’ quoth the little man, with his pipe in his mouth. ‘Do I not work?’ asked the peasant-farmer, turning almost fiercely on his friend; ‘I work from morning till night, and from the new year to the new year. But what does that avail when the season is bad? A hard winter, a late summer, and then fiery heat from June to August, without a drop of rain. The grass is hardly worth mowing; the clover is short and scanty, and the corn-crops are poor. When we thrash out the wheat, we shall find the greater part of the ear is husk.’ ‘Things may mend,’ said the colporteur; ‘they always reach their worst before they right themselves. When we have the States-general, why then we shall see, we shall see!’ Matthias shrugged his shoulders. ‘What did the Notables do for us last year?’