It is thus that from Argentan to Caen I found myself seated between a stout motherly person from Auvergne, and a little dark man from whose direction was wafted so strong an odour of garlic that I had no difficulty discerning from what region he hailed. Next to him were a bourgeois couple whose mourning attire, red eyes and swollen faces bespoke plainly enough the bereavement they had just suffered. Silent, indifferent to everything and everybody, their hands spread out on their knees, they stared into the ghastly emptiness, vainly seeking consolation for their shattered dream, their grief-trammelled souls. A heavily built couple of Norman farmers occupied the seats on either side of the door, and then came a tall young girl and her mother, a Belgian soldier, and finally a strange old creature wearing an antiquated starched bonnet, a flowered shawl, and carrying an umbrella such as one sees but in engravings illustrating the modes and customs of the eighteenth century. She was literally buried beneath a monumental basket which she insisted upon holding on her knees. Every available inch of floor space was covered with crocks and kits full of provisions, and in the rack above our heads were so many boxes and bundles, bags and bales, remaining aloft by such remarkable laws of equilibrium that I feared lest any moment they fall upon our heads, and once this catastrophe occurred there seemed to be little hope of extricating oneself from beneath the ruins. The conversation was opened by the Norman farmer who offered to relieve the little old woman of her basket and set it safely between his feet. "_Oh, non merci_," she piped in a thin little wavering treble, and an inimitable accent which made it impossible to guess her origin. "Oh, no, Monsieur, thank you," she continued. "It's full of cream tarts and cherry tarts, and custard pies made right in our own home. I'm taking them to my boy, and as we stayed up very late to make them so that they would be quite fresh, I should hate to have any of them crushed or broken. He did love them so when he was little!" "Our son was just the same. As soon as he was able to eat he begged them to let him have some _brioche_. But his fever was too high when we got there, and he couldn't take a thing. 'That doesn't matter,' he said to his mother. 'Just the sight of them makes my mouth water, and I feel better already.'" My Provencal neighbour could no longer resist. His natural loquaciousness got the better of his reserve. "Well, the first thing my son asked for was olives, so I brought him enough to last, as well as some sausage which he used to relish. Oh, if only I could bring him a little bit of our blue sky, I'm sure he would recover twice as quickly." The mother of the young girl now sat forward and asked the Norman farmer's wife where and how her son had been wounded.