When she had gone Mr. Roquevillard made no haste to move. He lingered, taking in with a loving eye all the fine land that stretched about him: the disburdened vines, whose purple and gold would live for him again in his joyful wines, the fields twice tilled, the orchards, the little nameless stream beyond them that separated the cantons of Coquin and Saint Cassin, the woods of oak and beeches, red and white, their colours shaded off by autumn into a pale bouquet. In these lands and the varied cultivation of them he read in this quiet hour a history not of the seasons, but of his own family. Such and such an ancestor had bought this field here, another had planted that vineyard; and he himself, had he not passed the boundaries of the canton when he acquired those woods that were so crowded now they called for cutting? Turning toward the farm buildings, he could see the first primitive cabin, changed now into a stable, which the first Roquevillards, honest peasants, had built. He contrasted it with the present large and substantial dwelling blazing with Virginia creeper. It was the same race, abiding in the same place, fortified by a past of honest labour and economy. He paid homage to it, recalling the words of old Fauchois: “It’s always the fault of the family.” His own race, moreover, had given the country men capable of serving the republic, as useful there as they had been in the administering of their own affairs. Thus the generations helped each other to a common prosperity. Had not the earliest of them all prepared his work for him? This land that he was treading on they had coveted and earned before him. This wide view had thrilled and exalted them as it thrilled him. With some difficulty he detached his gaze from his own domain and prefigured things as they must have seen it, the combination of lines and tints that made up the landscape, and on which their sense of it, like his own, must have depended. For though cultivatism may modify the immediate appearance of the land, men’s hands change nothing of its splendour and extent: they add only certain human marks, a roof with smoke above it, telling of the sweetness of a hearth, a path or hedge, memorials of the social life, a bell tower that speaks of prayer.