Padded with a perpetual layer of cow-dung, in which I sank to my knees, broken up shimmering puddles of dark-brown liquid manure, the farmyard also boasted a numerous population. Here the lambs skipped, the geese trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground, and the sow grunted with her swarm of little pigs hanging to her dugs. The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances. In a propitious season they would set fire to a stretch of moorland bristling with gorse and send the swing-plough across the ground enriched by the cinders from the fire. This yielded a few acres of rye, oats, and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which furnished the distaffs and spindles of the house with the material for cloth, and was looked upon as grandmother’s private crop. Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in the love of cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else. How dumbfounded he would have been to learn that, in the remote future, one of his family would become enamoured of those insignificant animals to which he had never vouchsafed a glance in his life! Had he guessed that that lunatic was myself, the scapegrace seated at the table by his side, what a smack of the head I should have caught, what a wrathful look! “The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have thundered. For the patriarch was not given to joking. I can still see his serious face, his unclipped head of hair, often brought back behind his ears with a flick of the thumb and spreading its ancient Gallic mane over his shoulders. I see his little three-cornered hat, his small-clothes buckled at the knees, his wooden shoes, stuffed with straw, that echoed as he walked. Ah, no! Once childhood’s games were past, it would never have done to rear the Grasshopper and unearth the Dung-beetle from his natural surroundings.