"I have none but good ideas of you, Brulette," replied the muleteer. "It is not your fault if Joseph loves you; and if you return his love in your secret heart no one can blame you. We may envy Joseph in that case, but not betray him or do anything to trouble you. Let me tell you how things have gone between him and me since the day we first made friends, when I persuaded him to come over to our parts and learn the music he was so crazy about." "I don't think you did him much good by that advice," observed my uncle. "It is my opinion he could have learned it just as well here, without grieving and distressing his family." "He told me," replied Huriel, "and I have since found it true, that the other bagpipers would not allow it. Besides, I owed him the truth, because he trusted me at first sight. Music is a wild flower which does not bloom in your parts. It loves our heather; but I can't tell you why. In our woods and dells it lives and thrives and lives again, like the flowers of spring; there it sows and harvests ideas for lands that are barren of them. The best things your pipers give you come from there; but as your players are lazy and niggardly, and you are satisfied to hear the same things over and over again, they only come to us once in their lives, and live on what they learn then for the rest of their days. At this very time they are teaching pupils to strum a corruption of our old music, and they never think of consulting at the fountainhead to find how such airs should be played. So when a well-intentioned young fellow like your José (as I said to him) comes to drink at the spring, he is sure to return so fresh and full that the other players could not stand up against him. That is why José agreed to go over into the Bourbonnais the following midsummer, where he could have enough work in the woods to support him, and lessons from our best master. I must tell you that the finest bagpipers are in Upper Bourbonnais, among the pine forests, over where the Sioule comes down from the Dôme mountains; and that my father, born in the village of Huriel, from which he takes his name, has spent his life among these players, and keeps his wind in good order and his art well-trained. He is a man who does not like to work two years running in the same place, and the older he gets the livelier and more fond of change he is. Last year he was in the forest of Troncay; since then he has been in that of Éspinasse. Just now he is in the woods of Alleu, where Joseph has followed him faithfully, chopping and felling and bagpiping by his side,--for he loves him like a son and boasts that the love is returned. The lad has been as happy as a lover can be when parted from his mistress. But life is not as easy and comfortable with us as with you; and though my father, taught by experience, tried to prevent Joseph (who was in a hurry to succeed) from straining his lungs on our pipes,--which are, as you may have noticed, differently made from