But up in the mountains of Basse Bretagne, the Montagnes Noirs as they are called, it is different. The climate is colder there, and the seasons later, reminding one more of Scotland. Indeed, the scenery is not unlike certain parts of Scotland; for, as one winds up the lonely roads that lead to the heart of these hills, one leaves the vegetation of the south behind them, and reaches a region of bare, heather-covered moors, peat-bogs, and low, scrubby fir-trees.
The country is sparsely populated. The traveller only comes across a cottage at long intervals, and when he does pass one he looks at the low walls and thatched roof, wondering what sort of lives the people live who dwell inside.
At the door of one of these lonely cottages a woman was standing one bright May morning—in the May that followed the events which we have described in the last chapters—shading her eyes from the sun.
She was dressed in the ordinary Breton peasant’s dress—a black gown, with a great white cap and a white plaited collar, and her face was wrinkled and weather-beaten.
‘Pierre, Pierre, where art thou?’ she cried, scanning the bare moorland with her keen black eyes; ‘it is already seven o’clock, and the pigs are not fed, nor the chickens, and the cow waits in her stall to be led out to pasture.’
There was no answer, and she shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
‘Plague upon the boy,’ she muttered, ‘and upon those who brought him! Three francs a week doth not go far on his food, for he eats like an ox, and as for trouble—hein!’ And she shrugged her shoulders again in the expressive way only practised by a Frenchwoman or an Italian, then she proceeded to search the wretched little outhouses which adjoined her cottage for the delinquent.
‘Thou lazy dreamer!’ she said, pulling him to his feet by thecollar of his blue cotton blouse. | |
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She found him at last, a little white-faced, dark-haired lad, clad in a blue cotton suit, and wearing the wooden sabots of the country. He was lying asleep in the sun behind a diminutive haystack, which looked as if hay-crops in that part of the country were wont to be scanty.
He woke with a start as the woman shook him roughly, and shrank away from her with a look of fear in his brown eyes.