While listening and day-dreaming, I was overtaken by a man and his donkey, both old acquaintances.  Every day, except Sundays and the great Church festivals, when the peasants of the Quercy abstain from work, like those of Brittany, this pair were in the habit of trudging together side by side to fetch and bring back wood from the slopes of the gorge.  The ass did all the carrying, and his master the chopping and sawing.  It was a monotonous life, but both seemed to think they were not worse off than the majority of men and donkeys.  The man was contented with his daily soup of bread-and-water, with an onion or a leek thrown in, and a suspicion of bacon, and the beast with such herbage as he could find while his master was getting ready another load of wood.  The man was an old soldier, who had seen some rough service, for he was at Sedan, and was afterwards engaged in the ghastly business of shooting down his own countrymen in Paris.  But, with all this, he was as quiet a tempered creature as his donkey, which he treated as a friend.  The army, he told me, was the best school for learning how to treat a beast with proper consideration.

I asked why.

‘Because,’ replied he, ’when a soldier is caught beating a horse, he has eight days of salle de police.’

Man and donkey having disappeared into a wood, my next companion was a small blue butterfly that kept a few yards in front of me, now stopping to look at a flower, now fluttering on again.  Some insects, as well as certain birds, appear to derive much entertainment from watching the movements of that fantastic animal—­man.

Arcadian leafiness:  rocky desolation befitting the mouth of hell.  Grass and flowers on which souls might tread in the paradise of the Florentine poet.  Stony forms, monstrous, enigmatic, reared like symbolic tokens of defeated gods, or of the worn-out evil passions that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment.  Why should I go on and seek further amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me?  What is my relation to them, and theirs to me?  Why should that beetle in the grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its beauty?  Why should yonder rock, standing like a spar of some ship wrecked in a cataclysm of the awful past, draw me to it as though it were the image of a grand, yet unattainable and blighted, longing of the human soul?

The gorge became so narrow and the rocks so high that there was a twilight under the trees, which still dripped with the rain-drops of last night’s storm.  Hesperis, columbine, and geranium contrasted their floral colours with the deep green of the young grass.  Some spots of dark purple were on the ground where the light was most dim.  They were the petals and calyxes of that strange flower, lathraea, of the broom-rape family.  Each bloom seemed to be carried in the cup of another flower.  The plant had no leaves, for it was a thief that drew its nutriment from the root of an honest little tree that had struggled upward in the shade of strong and greedy rivals, and had raised its head at length into the sunshine in spite of them.