“Soap is it, my angel?” asked his mother, lifting his face in her two wet hands. “Oh, but there is really no soap at all to speak about, just a bubble or two of suds. _There!_” and with the corner of her apron she wiped away the thick white lather around his eyelashes, so that Philippe looked like a little boy made of snow, except for his eyes which were large and brown and filled with tears from the painful smarting. From head to ankles he was covered with a froth of soapsuds, and his feet had stirred the warm water in the bottom of the wooden tub into rainbow-tinted mounds of bubbles which grew and grew and cascaded over the sides with a tiny fizzing sound. “You are giving our young one a very thorough tubbing,” remarked Philippe’s father. He was sitting under the narrow window of their cottage, cutting the yellow-white sprouts from a bag of potatoes which he intended to plant in the dark of the next moon. “Indeed I am. I shall scrub and rub and polish until he looks like a wax image, or as pink and shining as the inside of the seashell his Uncle Pablôt sent him from Paimpol.” Philippe’s father held a large brown potato at arm’s length, and, regarding it with his head cocked to one side, said: “Very fine! Yes, very fine!” “A good size,” agreed his wife, looking over her shoulder, while she absently bored into the ear of her long-suffering son with a bit of soapy rag. “Yes—but I was thinking rather of Philippe’s Uncle Pablôt. It is he who is very fine, a grand gentleman who carries a gold-headed cane and has traveled far—to the very borders of our beloved France, and even beyond, so I hear.” “Oh, very much beyond! He has been in every country in the world, according to the wonderful stories he tells, and the world, Pierre, I understand to be of a tremendous bigness; indeed, if what I am told is the truth, it must be three or four times as big as our own country!” “Is that so?” replied Pierre doubtfully, starting to cut the pallid sprouts again with quick motions of his work-hardened hands. “It may all be the truth, my good wife, but I have always taken the words of Pablôt with a grain of salt; I think, for that matter, that he is a little inclined to blow.” “‘Blow’?” asked Philippe from his tub. “I thought it was only the wind that could blow.” But of course no one answered him, for he was only a little boy, and not expected to understand; instead, his father bent over his bag of potatoes to hide his smile, and his mother remembered that the _pot-au-feu_ (which is a thick soup made of odds and ends and bits and scraps and almost everything you can think of mixed with water in a large pot and left on the fire to bubble sluggishly for many hours) needed stirring right away. “Take care,” warned her husband, “that you do not drop soap into the soup from your wet hands, for I know of nothing that gives it a more curious flavor.”