The girls who were engaged for the olive gathering at Mouriès would hire him to tell them stories in the evenings. They gave him, I think, each one, a halfpenny for the evening. He kept them in fits of laughter, for he knew all the stories, more or less humorous, that from one to another were transmitted among the people, such as “Jean de la Vache,” “Jean de la Mule,” “Jean de l’Ours,” “Le Doreur,” &c. Directly the snow began to fall we knew “The Major” would soon make his appearance. And he never failed. “Good-day, cousin.” “Cousin, good-day.” And there he was. His hand shaken and his stick deposited, unobtrusively he took up his accustomed seat in his corner, and, while eating a good slice of bread and butter and cheese, he would give us the news. Cousin Tourette being, like most dreamers, a bit of an idler, had all his life dreamt of a remunerative post where there would be very little work. “I should like,” he told us, “the situation of reckoner of cod-fish. At Marseilles, for instance, in one of those big shops where they unload, a man can, while seated, earn, so I am told, by counting the fish in dozens, his twelve hundred francs a year!” Poor old Major! He died, like many another, without having realised his cod-fish dream. I can never forget either, among those who helped me to make the poetry of _Mireille_, the woodcutter Siboul, a fine fellow from Montfrin, in a suit of velvet, who came every year towards the end of the autumn with his great billhook to trim our undergrowth of willow. While he worked away busily, what shrewd observations he would make to me about the Rhône, its currents, eddies, lagoons and bays, the soil and the islands! Also about the animals that frequented the dikes, the otters that lodged in the hollow trees, the beavers who work as deftly as woodcutters, the birds who suspend their nests from the white poplars, besides endless stories of the osier-cutters and basket-makers of Vallabrèque and that district. My chief instructor, however, in the botany of Provence was our neighbour Xavier, a peasant herbalist, who told me the Provençal names and virtues of all the simples and herbs of Saint-Jean and of Saint-Roch. And thus I collected such a good store of botanical knowledge that, without wishing to speak slightingly of the learned professors of our schools, either high or low, I believe those gentlemen would have found it difficult to pass the examination I could, for instance, on the subject of thistles. Suddenly, like a bomb, during this quiet, growing time of my _Mireille_, burst the news of the Revolution of December 2, 1851.