While I was examining with growing curiosity this strange keeper of sheep, fair, with bare neck and bare feet, was busy watching on the same side of the hill another flock, and at the same time gathering herbs for medicinal purposes. When she was about to leave, she offered the shepherd to attend to his wound, sword handle, and this but he refused haughtily; she ran away laughing, and threw a flower into his face.
He did not pick up that flower; he did not salute that pretty girl as she left him. He looked at her with disdain.
Ah! I can doubt it no longer; this unhappy man is like the wood-cutter in the forest, and the laborers in the field, one of those prisoners taken in war, whom the Druids have spared, and now render useful. His closely shorn hair, his open wound, and the heavy wooden yoke which he has to carry on his neck, all betray his sad fate. He has made no reply to the half pitiful, half coquettish advances of the pretty gatherer of simples, because she has only awakened in his heart painful memories of his distant love, or of his wife, whom he is never to see again! He has cast glances of fierce hatred and burning revenge at the Druidical altar and the handle of the sword, because both of these objects point out the place of bloody sacrifices. Does he think he is himself destined to be slain? or was perhaps the warrior whom they slew yesterday, a man of his own tribe, his best friend, his own brother?
But I have taken refuge here in order to escape from these painful thoughts of blood and murder. I propose to seek new objects of interest.
Farther down, nearly at the foot of the hill, I see a few huts, or rather a few low, almost crushed roofs, which seem hardly to rise from the ground. Are they houses, or stables, or caves?
On the left bank Gauls and Romans have alike disappeared in the mists rising from the river. On the right bank the wood-cutters and the field-laborors are resting upon their axes or their ploughs, and seem to ask the sun if the day is not drawing to an end.
