"Yes," said Michel, "I've noticed that too: it's a good thing the coffins are not hollow!"
And the man of experience told us of the shape of the railway-sleepers, which were usually cut from the block in pairs, before being sawn asunder, and which, with their six corners, looked not unlike a coffin.
We turned back then and there, and as we went along the edge of the field, where the grass was nice and smooth, my father said to me:
"This gives us a good chance of laughing at ourselves, lest others should. That's the way things go: when we've fallen out with a man, we put down everything that's bad to him and are as blind as if Satan had stuck his horns into our eyes. When all is said, even those two wood-cutters are not so black as they appear to be. Still, I shall be glad when they have cleared out. And this much I do know: Clements buys no more larch of me."
"Because you have none left," was my wise comment on that.
Father did not seem to hear.
The wood-cutters went at last and the larch-wood sleepers with them. The red-brown stumps remained behind; and in their pores stood bright drops of rosin.
"It shows that they were not Christians," I remember my father saying, "that they did not cut a cross in a single stump."
For, at that time, it was still the custom, in the forest, for the wood-cutters to carve a little cross with the axe into each stump as soon as the tree had fallen. Why, I was never quite able to discover: it was probably for the same reason that makes the blacksmith give two taps with his hammer on the anvil, after the red-hot iron is removed. These things are intended to thwart the devil, who, as everybody knows, is never idle and interferes in all the works of man.
My father, whose whole life was bound up with the cross, went afterwards and cut crosses in the larch-stumps. And so things in the forest were once more in order and peaceful, as they used to be.