"Fool? Not at all," he said. "Frank as to heart and shrewd as to interest,--that's what you are and ever will be; but living in body and lively in soul you never can be. And this is why, Tiennet," he added, pointing to the furniture of the room. "See these big-bellied beds where you sleep in feathers up to your eyes. You are spade and pickaxe folk,--toilers in the sun,--but you must have your downy beds to rest in. We forest fellows would soon be ill if we had to bury ourselves alive in sheets and blankets. A log hut, a fern bed,--that's our home and our furniture; even those of us who travel constantly and don't mind paying the inn charges, can't stand a roof over our heads; we sleep in the open air in the depth of winter, on the pack-saddles of our mules, with the snow for a coverlet. Here you have dresses and tables and chairs and fine china, ground glass, good wine, a roasting-jack and soup-pots, and heaven knows what? You think you must have all that to make you happy; you work your jaws like cows that chew the cud; and so, when obliged to get upon your feet and go back to work, you have a pain in your chest two or three times a day. You are heavy, and no gayer at heart than your beasts of burden. On Sundays you sit, with your elbows on the table, eating more than your hunger tells you to, and drinking more than your thirst requires; you think you are amusing yourself by storing up indigestion and sighing after girls who are only bored with you though they don't know why,--your partners in those dragging dances in rooms and barns where you suffocate; turning your holidays and festivals into a burden the more upon your spirits and stomachs. Yes, Tiennet, that's the life you live. To indulge your ease you increase your wants, and in order to live well you don't live at all." "And how do you live, you muleteers?" I said, rather shaken by his remarks. "I don't speak now of your part of the country, of which I know nothing, but of you, a muleteer, whom I see there before me, drinking hard, with your elbows on the table, not sorry to find a fire to light your pipe and a Christian to talk with. Are you made different from other men? When you have led this hard life you boast of for a score of years, won't you spend your money, which you have amassed by depriving yourself of everything, in procuring a wife, a house, a table, a good bed, good wine, and rest at last?"