As they followed him, Monsieur Antoine called Emile's attention to the beauty of the landscape that was gradually unfolded before them. "Our Creuse also took it into its head to overflow the other day," he said; "but all the hay along the banks had been housed, thanks to Jean's advice, for he had warned us not to let it get overripe. Everybody hereabout looks up to him as an oracle, and it's a fact that he has a great faculty of observation and a prodigious memory. By the aid of certain signs that nobody else notices, the color of the water or the clouds, and especially the influence of the moon in the first fortnight of spring, he can predict infallibly what sort of weather we are to hope for or fear throughout the year. He would be an invaluable man for your father, if he would listen to him. He is good at everything, and if I were in Monsieur Cardonnet's position, nothing would deter me from trying to make a friend of him; for it's of no use to think of making him into an assiduous and well-disciplined servant. He has the nature of the savage, who dies when he is brought into subjection. Jean Jappeloup will never do anything good except of his own free will; but just get hold of his heart, which is the biggest heart God ever made, and you will see how, on important occasions, that man rises above what he seems to be! Let Monsieur Cardonnet's establishment be endangered by freshet, fire or any unforeseen catastrophe, and then he will tell you if Jean Jappeloup's head and arms can be too dearly bought and sheltered!" Emile did not listen to the end of this eulogy with the interest which it would have aroused in him under any other circumstances, for his ears and his thoughts had taken another direction: a fresh young voice was singing, or rather humming, at a little distance, one of those melodies, charming in their melancholy and artless sweetness, which are peculiar to the country. And the châtelain's daughter, the bachelor's child, whose mother's name was a mystery to the whole neighborhood, appeared at the corner of a clump of eglantine, as lovely as the loveliest wild-flower of that charming solitude.