The Devil's Pool

bandman. Doubtless it is a depressing thing to consume one's strength and one's life driving the plough through the bosom of the jealous earth, which yields the treasur

e majority. As a general rule, the man of leisure does not love, for themselves, the fields, or the meadows, or the spectacle of nature, or the superb beasts that are to be conve

tic life. To him also the golden fields, the lovely meadows, the noble animals, represent bags of crowns, of which he will have only a paltry share, insufficient f

m the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live in the heart and the brain, to understand his work, and to love the work of God. The artist has enjoyment of that sort in contemplating and reproducing the beauties of Nature; but, when he sees the suffering of the men who people this paradise called the earth, the just, kind-hearted artist is grieved in the midst of his enjoyment. Where the m

le, perhaps,-at all events, to feel, the beautiful. Do you believe that this mysterious intuition of poesy does not already exist within him in the state of instinct and vague revery? In those who have a little hoard for their protection to-day, and in whom excess of misery does not stifle all moral and intellectual development, pure happiness, felt and appreciated, is at the elementary stage; and, furthermore, if poets' voices have already arisen from the bosom of

the ground, freshly opened by the sharp ploughshares, exhaled a slight vapor. At the upper end of the field, an old man, whose broad back and stern face recalled the man in Holbein's picture, but whose clothing did not indicate poverty, gravely drove his old-fashioned areau, drawn by two placid oxen, with pale yellow hides, veritable patriarchs of the fields, tall, rather thin, with long, blunt horns, hard-working old beasts whom long companionship has made brothers, as they are called in our country districts, and who, when they are separated, refuse to work with new mates and die of grief. People who know nothing

han he; but as he kept constantly at work, never turning aside, and exerting always just the requisite amount of sustained power, his f

, with the short, curly heads that suggest the wild bull, the great, wild eyes, the abrupt movements, the nervous, jerky way of doing their work, which shows that the yoke and goad still irritate them and that they shiver with wrath as they yield to the domination newly imposed upon th

the young man held the four leaders in check with voice and goad, while the child handled the other four. He, too, shouted, poor little fellow, in a voice which he tried to render terrible, but which remained as sweet as his angelic face. The whole picture was beautiful in strength and in grace: the landscape, the man, the child, the oxen under the yoke; and, despite the mighty struggle in which the earth was conquered, there was a feeling of peace and profound tranquillity hovering over everything. When the obstacle was surmounted and the team resumed its even, solemn progress, the ploughman, whose pretended violence was only to give his muscles a little practice and his vitality an outlet, suddenly resumed the serenity of simple souls and cast a contented glance upon his child, who turned to smile at him. Then the manly voice of the young paterfamil

ple manners of the men who sing it, that no genius unfamiliar with work in the fields could have invented it, and no singer other than a cunning ploughman of that region would know how to render it. At the time of year when there is no other work and no other sign of activity in the country than the ploughing, that sweet and powerful chant rises like the voice of the breeze, which it resembles so

d of a sad old man, a cheerful young man; instead of a team of thin, sorry horses, two yoke of four sturdy, spirited cattle; instead of Death

that the Fre

de ton vis

compassion mingled with involuntary respect. Happy the husbandman. Yes, so I should be in his place, if my arm should suddenly become strong and my chest powerful, so that they could thus fertilize nature and sing to her, without my eyes losing the power to see and my brain to u

re born kings of the earth much more truly than they who possess it, because they have paid for it. And the proof that they feel that it is so is found in the fact that you cannot expatriate them with impunity, and that they love the ground watered by the sweat of their brow, that the true peasant dies of homesickness in the uniform of the soldier, far from the fields where he was bo

ienable right to command him, for that terrible error proves that in you the mind has killed the heart and that you are the most incomplete and the blindest of men!-I prefer the simplicity of his mind to the false enlightenment of yours; a

Although a peasant and a simple ploughman, Germain had taken account of his duties and his affections. He had detailed them to me ingenuously one day, and I had listened to him with interest. When I had wa

tle earth effaces it, and the furrows we have made succeed one another like graves in the cemetery. Is not the furrow of the ploughman as valuable as that

cunning ploughman. He will know nothing about it, and will not be di