At evening there were dances, and there were songs, in which Flower o' the Wheat excelled. She knew every song of that region, and would sing in a nasal, untutored voice, delicious to the rustic ear, ingenuous poems, in which "The King's Son," the "Nightingale," and the "Rose" appeared in fantastic splendours, joyful or sad. A local bard had even made about Flower o' the Wheat, a somewhat free and outspoken song in dialect, the refrain of which said that the flower of the wheat surrenders its grain under the harvester's flail. Flower o' the Wheat without false shame celebrated herself in song, and there were fine jostlings if some young fellow jokingly made believe to put the refrain into action. Sooner or later, Flower o' the Wheat was bound to come under the harvester's flail. And here I call the reader's attention to this story, whose merit is that it is the story of everyone. I know of no greater error than to suppose that extraordinary adventures are what make life interesting. If one looks closely, one finds that the truly marvellous things are those which happen to us every day, and that duels, dagger thrusts, even automobile accidents, with accompanying hatred, jealousy, betrayed love, and treachery, are in reality the vulgar incidents in the enormous drama of our common life from birth to death. To bring, without any will of our own, our ego to the consciousness of this world, be subject to a fatal concatenation of joys and sorrows dealt by the hazard of fortune, and end in the slow decay which brings us back to the condition preceding our existence, is not this the supreme adventure? What more is needed to make us marvel? Some, who are called pessimists, accept it with a certain amount of grumbling. Others, regarded as optimists, consider their misfortune so great that they eagerly add to it, by way of consolation, the dream of a celestial adventure which everyone is free to embellish as much as he pleases. Flower o' the Wheat did not bother her head with any of this. She was twenty, a more engrossing fact. She listened to the voice of her youth, like the women gone before her, as well as those who will follow her on this earth. In the fields, nature being so close, people are very little hampered by the more or less fantastic social conventions, which undertake to regulate the human relations between two young creatures hungering and thirsting for each other.