"You must know," began Père Bastien, very readily (for he was fond of talking when he was listened to willingly), "that I might have been something if I had given myself wholly up to music. I could have done so had I made myself a fiddler, as I thought of doing in my youth. I don't mean that one improves a talent by fiddling three days and nights at a wedding, like that fellow I can hear from here, murdering the tune of our mountain jig. When a man has no object before his mind but money, he gets tired and rusty; but there's a way for an artist to live by his body without killing the soul within him. As every festival brings him in at least twenty or thirty francs, that's enough for him to take his ease, to live frugally, and travel about for pleasure and instruction. That's what Joseph wants to do, and I have always advised him to do it. But here's what happened to me. I fell in love, and the mother of my dear children would not hear of marrying a fiddler without hearth or home, always a-going, spending his nights in a racket and his days in sleeping, and ending his life with a debauch; for, unhappily, it is seldom that a man can keep himself straight at that business. She kept me tied to the woodsman's craft, and that's the whole story. I never regretted my talent as long as she lived. To me, as I told you, love is the divinest music. When I was left a widower with two young children, I gave myself wholly to them; but my music got very rusty and my fingers very stiff by dint of handling axe and shears; and, I confess to you, Tiennet, that if my two children were happily married, I should quit this burdensome business of slinging iron and chopping wood, and I would be off, happy and young again, to live as I liked, seeking converse with angels, until old age brought me back, feeble but satisfied, to my children's hearth. And then, too, I am sick of felling trees. Do you know, Tiennet, I love them, those noble old companions of my life, who have told me so many things by the murmur of their leaves and the crackling of their branches. And I, more malignant than the fire from heaven, I have thanked them by driving an axe into their hearts and laying them low at my feet like so many dismembered corpses! Don't laugh at me, but I have never seen an old oak fall, nor even a young willow, without trembling with pity or with fear, as an assassin of the works of God. I long to walk beneath their shady branches, repulsed no longer as an ingrate, and listening at last to the secrets I was once unworthy to hear." The Head-Woodsman, whose voice had grown impassioned, stopped short and thought a moment; and so did I, amazed not to think him the madman I should have thought another in his place,--perhaps because he had managed to put his ideas into me, or possibly because I myself had had some such ideas in my own head.