The bullfinch and the maker of wooden shoes who loved each other tenderly had no remotest expectation of reward beside the pleasure of living and telling their love, each in his own language at first, and later, each, as far as he could, in the language of the other. I have forgotten the shoemaker's name, but I could go blindfold to his house on the main street of the village in the Vendée where I used yearly to spend a happy month of vacation. I can see his white sign board with a magnificent yellow wooden shoe agreeably surrounded by decorative additions. I can see the little door with glass panes, giving access to the shop, hardly larger than a wardrobe, where rows of wooden shoes hung from the ceiling, were hooked to the walls, littered the floor, and even overran into the street. The little court behind the shop has remained particularly vivid in my memory. That was the workshop. There, with both hands clasped around the tool that flung chips into his face, the artist would miraculously draw from a block of wood braced against his chest the form of a wooden shoe. Julius II, watching the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel as they sprang from Michael Angelo's brush, could not have been more impressed than was my youth before the prodigies performed by the shoemaker. He, for the increase of my pleasure, seemed to share it; he accompanied the manoeuvres of his adze with commentaries calculated to drive well into my soul the particular merits of his work. He was a poor, pale, thin, fragile being, himself carved down as if by an adze, rubbed flat and hollowed out by sickness. Folds of white skin below his hairless chin trembled when he moved. His eyes were of no colour. He had a nasal, far-away voice, like that of a consumptive ventriloquist. I never knew anything about him. I do not believe he had any family--I never saw a petticoat that seemed to belong in the house. All day long he worked at his wooden shoes without a word, perhaps without a thought, happy in his little friend the bullfinch on whom were centred all the emotions of his existence.