"Citizens, are you mad? No peasant owns so much as that."
"Why not? A great many persons in my country own more than this whole valley."
"A great part of this land," said Gabriel, "belonged to a grand seignior, some small portions being owned by citizens; but he was guillotined, his property confiscated, the land parcelled out and sold, so that it has passed into the hands of the people. Before the revolution," said he, "the land, at the death of the parent, went to the oldest son; but that law is abolished, and it is now equally divided; for which reason, in respect to some small properties, the children possess only a few rods; sometimes an olive tree, or mulberry, standing in ten rods of land; and this is the homestead of a whole family—their farm."
[CHAPTER V.]
THE YANKEE BOYS' HOLIDAY IN PROVENCE.
The peasants now began to return to the village, while the boys prepared to camp out. Walter, at a hasty glance along the side of the mountain, perceiving many trees, took it for granted, without further examination, that they were forest trees, and would furnish material for a fire; but as they approached, to his great chagrin, he noticed that they were mulberry, olive, and figs, and that there was not even a bush or a bramble that could be taken to feed a fire. This at once reversed the whole train of his ideas, and threw him into a state of mind entirely foreign to his usual cheerful, buoyant frame, and a mood not to be pleased with anything, which communicated itself, though with less intensity, to Ned, who, never having experienced those peculiar emotions begotten of the free wild life in the woods, was not peculiarly touched by the disappointment.
"I think it is a great way for people who live by their labor to be so far from their work. I should think it would take half of their time to go and come."
"They don't know how to put things ahead with a rush, as we do," said Walter.
"How can a man think much of his time when it's worth only twenty cents a day?"
"It ain't worth that, for a sou ain't quite a cent. They will work all day in a half bushel, and don't know how to take advantage of work. I've heard the captain say that they were once little better than slaves to the aristocracy, and have been so long used to working at a slave jog that they keep it up, and always want to huddle together like a nest of rats."