One night, coming home, I found Joseph sitting on the edge of the fountain which is called the Font de Fond. My house, then known by the name of "God's crossing," because it was built where two roads, since altered, crossed each other, looked out upon that fine greensward which you saw not long ago sold and cut up as waste land,—a great misfortune for the poor, who used it as a common to feed their beasts, but hadn't enough money to buy it. It was a wide bit of pasture-land, very green, and watered here and there by the brook, which was not kept within bounds but ran as it pleased through the grass, cropped short by the flocks, and always pleasing to the eye as it stretched away in the distance.
I contented myself with bidding Joseph good-evening; but he rose and walked beside me, as if seeking a conversation, and seemed so agitated that I was quite uneasy about him.
"What's the matter with you?" I said at last, seeing that he was talking at random, and twisting his body and groaning as though he had stepped on an ant-hill.
"How can you ask me?" he said, impatiently. "Is it nothing to you? Are you deaf?"
"Who? why? what is it?" I cried, thinking he must see some vision, and not very anxious to share it.
Then I listened, and heard in the distance the sound of a bagpipe, which seemed to me natural enough.
"Well," I said, "that's only some musician returning from a wedding over at Berthenoux. Why should that annoy you?"
Joseph answered with an air of decision,—
"That is Carnat's bagpipe, but he is not playing it; it is some one more clumsy even than he."
"Clumsy? Do you call Carnat clumsy with the bagpipe?"