"--Not in the whole of France!" repeated Pere Philibert with conviction, nodding from the dappled shade of the orchard-boughs towards the river, where it ran sparkling far below, by grey willows and a margin of mica-strewn sand; not 'apples of gold in a network of silver,' but a landscape all silver seen through a frame of green foliage starred with golden fruit. The orchard-gate clicked behind us. Brother Marc Antoine, reclining beside the sow with his back against an apple-tree bole, slewed himself round for a look. Pere Philibert and I, turning together, saw a man and a woman approaching, with hangdog looks, and a priest between them--the Cure of Ambialet--who seemed to be exhorting them by turns to keep up their courage. "Pouf!" said the Curd, letting out a big sigh as he came to a standstill and mopped his brow. "Had ever poor man such trouble with his flock?-- and the thermometer at twenty-eight, too! Advance, my children--you first, Maman Vacher; and Heaven grant the good father here may compose your differences!" Here the Cure--himself a peasant--flung out both hands as if resigning the case. Pere Philibert, finger on chin, eyed the two disputants with an air of grave abstraction, waiting for one or the other to begin. Brother Marc Antoine leaned back against the apple-tree, and took snuff. His eyes twinkled. Clearly he expected good sport, and I gathered that this was not the first of Ambialet's social difficulties to be brought up to the Priory for solution. But for the moment both disputants hung back. The woman--an old crone, with a face like a carved nutcracker--dropped an obeisance and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. The man shifted his weight from foot to foot while he glanced furtively from one to the other of us. I recognised him for Ambialet's only baker, a black-avised fellow on the youthful side of forty. Clearly, the grave dignity of Pere Philibert abashed them. "_Mais allez, donc! Allez!_" cried the Curd, much as one starts a team of horses. Pere Philibert turned slowly on his heel, and, waving a hand once more toward the river, continued his discourse as though it had not been interrupted. "One might say almost the whole world cannot show its like! To be sure, the historian Herodotus tells us that, when Babylon stood in danger of the Medes, Queen Nitocris applied herself to dig new channels for the Euphrates to make it run crookedly. And in one place she made it wind so that travellers down the river came thrice to the same village on three successive days." "_Te-te!_" interrupted Brother Marc Antoine, with a chuckle. "Wake up, Zephirine--wake up, old lady, and listen to this." Zephirine, smitten affectionately on the ham, answered only with a short squeal like a bagpipe, and buried her snout deeper in the grass.