"Now, Nance," he said, turning from the thoroughly squelched Aunt Barbara to us, "Jean François comes with his happy caravan—a name I gave his outfit the first time I saw it—every year when May or June is at her bonniest. Nobody knows just when or where he comes from, and no one, who loves him, cares. All of a sudden he's here, that's all. He always camps on the green, where you discovered him last night, overlooking the river. Sometimes he's here most of the summer. Sometimes it's just a week, or a month. Then, like he comes, he just goes.
"'It's a fever,' he said to me once in answer to a question as to why he was off, when I met him on the river road, bound west. 'It's a fever that you, old Saddle-bags, can't pill or cuss away.... Au revoir,' and his Columbine moved away.
"Occasionally he returns during the late September days. It is only for a week or a day, however.... I can always tell that he is coming by the wild geese flying. He is a migratory bird—this Jean François of ours."
If the doctor continued to speak of the pedler to Aunt Barbara, we never knew it. Nance and I slipped through the door into the June sunshine and hurried across the village to the common, where camped the master of the happy caravan.
CHAPTER THREE
JEAN FRANÇOIS' VAST POSSESSIONS
Would it make you happy to know that you possessed, as your heart's own, a long, white, alluring road? A joyous, lovable, intimate road which leads over the hills through a thousand friendly trees, all sheltered beneath the wide blue sky. A road of many moods: a gentle road; a brave, true road; a morning road; a smiling, sunset road; a devil-may-care, starlit road; a lover's moon-whitened road; a road that goes and goes, never returns, yet always is homeward bound. Home to the dingle, the glen, the sheltering greenwood, the chattering little river; the camp of the gipsy. A road bordered by flower-faced fields with drowsing villages, now and then, like ancient inns with bread and cheese and milk.
Such is Jean François' great highway. All the morning he spent telling us of le long du trimard, to use an expression frequently upon his lips. He told us of the men of the road, their dreams, their strange and adventurous lives. Often he spoke simply of amazing and unlooked-for deeds of heroism. He sang of nymphs, of dryads with wondrous beauty. He talked of marvelous, strong-limbed satyrs, of gentle fauns stealing through the wild-wood. In whispered words, with bated breath, as if he told of sacred secret things, he described to us the days of his brother, the great god Pan.