So, as a rule, they left him alone in the severest manner.
Of course this could not endure for ever. Bertie was approaching the Land of Golden Dreams in a sense of which he had not dreamed even in his wildest dreams. One cannot subsist on roots alone. Nor can a young gentleman, used to cosy beds and well-warmed rooms and regular meals, exist for long on such a diet, under ever-changing skies, in an inhospitable country, in the open air. Bertie was worn to a shadow. He was wasted not only physically, but mentally and morally. He was a ghost of what he once had been, enfeebled in mind and body.
If something did not happen soon to change his course of living, he would soon bring his journeying to an untimely end, and reach the Land of Dreams indeed.
Something did happen, but it was not by any means the sort of thing which was required.
One day a great hunt took place in that district. It was first-rate sport. They occasionally hunt wolves, and even wild boars in Finistère, but this time what was hunted was a boy. And the boy was Bertie.
The mayor of St. Thégonnec was a wise man. All mayors are of necessity, and from the nature of their office, wise, especially the mayors of rural France; and this mayor was the wisest of wise mayors. He was a miller by trade, honest as millers go, and as pig-headed a rustic as was ever found in Finistère. His name was Baudry--Jean Baudry.
It was reported to M. Baudry by his colleague, the mayor of the commune of Plouigneau, which lies on the other side of Morlaix, that there was a Being--with a capital B--which had come no one knew from whence, and which was plundering the fields in a way calculated to make the blood of all honest men turn cold--or hot, as might accord best with the natural disposition of the blood of the man in question.
The mayor of St. Thégonnec had told this story to the mayor of Morlaix; and the mayor of Morlaix, being the mayor of the arrondissement, had thought it an excellent opportunity to snub the mayor of a mere commune, and had snubbed the mayor of St. Thégonnec accordingly; who, coming fresh from the snubbing, had encountered his colleague in the market-place, and then and there told his wrongs.
The two worthies agreed that, at the first opportunity, they would lay violent hands upon this plunderer of the fields of honest men, and make him wish that he had left such fields alone.
Such an opportunity, or what looked like such an one, was not long in offering itself to M. Baudry.