and the soil that bore themall worn out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a

national blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite

example of luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to

equal purpose; nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had,

somehow or other, brought things to this. Strange that Creation,

designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry

and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted in the

eternal arrangements, surely! Thus it was, however; and the last

drop of blood having been extracted from the flints, and the last

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screw of the rack having been turned so often that its purchase

crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing to bite,

Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and

unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a

village like it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had

squeezed it and wrung it, and had seldom graced it with his

presence except for the pleasures of the chasenow, found in

hunting the people; now, found in hunting the beasts, for whose

preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and

barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of

strange faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the

high-caste, chiseled, and otherwise beautified and beautifying

features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in

the dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and

to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied

in thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he

would eat if he had itin these times, as he raised his eyes from

his lonely labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some

rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was once a

rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it

advanced, the mender of roads would discern without surprise,

that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall,

in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of

roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many

highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds,

sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways

through woods.

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Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July

weather, as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such

shelter as he could get from a shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at

the mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified

these objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect

that was just intelligible:

“How goes it, Jacques?”

“All well, Jacques.”