The peasant has a dull ear, especially the Berri peasant. The ox-drivers, excited by their unaccustomed interest in their work, did not hear the master's voice, especially as the straining of the ropes, the groaning of the yokes and the carpenter's powerful shouts, rising above everything, drowned those shrill tones. The weather was threatening, the horizon was a mass of dark purple clouds which were rapidly overspreading the sky. Jean, dripping with perspiration, had kept everybody at work, swearing that the job must be finished before the rain, which would swell the stream and might carry away the trees they had felled. A sort of frenzy had taken possession of him, and despite the true piety which reigned in his heart, he swore like a heathen, as if he thought that he could in that way increase his strength tenfold. The blood hummed in his ears; exclamations of excitement and satisfaction escaped him at every exploit of his muscular arm, and mingled with the rumbling of the thunder. Violent gusts of wind enveloped him in leaves and kept his coarse silvery locks flying about his forehead. With his pale face, his flashing eyes, his leathern apron, his tall thin figure, his bare arms brandishing the axe, he had the aspect of a Cyclops, on the sides of Mount Ætna, gathering wood to keep alight the fire of his infernal forge. While the marquis exhausted his strength in unavailing cries, the carpenter, having cleared away the last obstacle, darted back to the round trunk of a young maple, with an address that would have done credit to a professional acrobat, leaped to the bank, and, seizing the draught-rope, was reinforcing the tired oxen with his exuberant muscular strength, when he felt upon his loins, covered with a coarse shirt only, the sting of Monsieur de Boisguilbault's flexible bamboo. The carpenter thought that a branch had swung back against him, as often happened in such battles with verdure-clad boughs. He uttered a terrible oath, turned quickly and cut the marquis's cane in two with his axe, exclaiming: "I guess that won't strike another man!" He had no sooner pronounced this apostrophe of extermination, than his eyes, veiled by the excitement of toil, suddenly shone clear, and, by the glare of a vivid flash of lightning, he saw his benefactor standing before him, pale as a ghost. The marquis still held in his hand, which trembled with rage, the stump of his cane and its gold head. The stump was so short that it was plain that Jean had narrowly missed striking off the hand that was rashly raised against him. "By the five hundred thousand names of the devil, Monsieur de Boisguilbault!" he cried, throwing away his axe; "if this is your ghost come here to torment me, I will have a mass said for you; but if it's yourself, in flesh and blood, speak to me, for I am not patient with people from the other world."