Even the weather was bad. Before him the plain of Alsace, smooth, scarcely marked with some lines of trees, stretched out to the foot of the Vosges, covered with forests which made their height appear less than it was. The north wind, blowing from the sea, filling all the valley with its continuous wailing, chased the dark clouds from the sky, broken and heaped together like furrows in fields, clouds full of rain and hail, which would dissolve in compact masses to fall in the south, on the side of the Alps. It was cold. Meanwhile Jean Oberlé, having looked to the left, from the side where the land declined a little, perceived the avenue ending in a little wood, which he had seen in the morning, and he felt again that his youth called to _her_. He made sure no one was watching him from the windows of his home, and he took the path which turned round the village. It was really only a track traced by people going to, and coming from work. It followed very nearly the zigzag line made by the sheds, the pig-styes, the stables, the barns, the low boundaries commanded by the manure-heaps, fowl-houses, all the back buildings of the dwellings of Alsheim, which had on the other side, on the road, their principal façade, or at least a white wall, a cart-door, and a great mulberry-tree overflowing the edge of it. The young man walked quietly on the beaten track. He passed the church which, almost in the centre of Alsheim, raised its square tower, surmounted by a slate roof in the form of a steeple, with a metal point, and came to the centre of a group of four enormous walnut-trees, serving as landmarks, as ornament and shelter to the last farm in the village. There began the property of M. Xavier Bastian, the mayor of Alsheim, the old friend of M. Joseph Oberlé, a man of influence, rich and patriotic, and to whose house Jean was going. The sound of flails could be heard in the neighbouring yard. It must be the fine, big sons of the Ramspacher, the Bastians' tenants. One had served his time in the German army, the other was going to join his regiment in the month of November. They were threshing under the barn in the old style. Every autumn, every winter, when the miller's store of corn diminished, and when the weather was bad outside, they spread out some sheaves in the shelter, and their flails struck blithely and galloped like colts let loose in high grass. Nothing had stopped the tradition.