be distinguished from the objects around her.  The little wild country girl is like the spirit of the fields, woods, rivers and precipices.  She is a being very near to Nature.  Inquisitive and mischievous, she is bold in her speech, because she is treated as a reprobate.  She jeers, because she knows that she is detested, and she scratches, because she suffers.  The day comes when she feels some of that affection which makes the atmosphere breathable for human beings.  She feels her heart beating faster in her bosom, thanks to this affection, and from that minute a transformation takes place within her.  Landry, who has been observing her, is of opinion that she must be something of a witch.  Landry is very simple-minded.  There is no witchcraft here except that of love, and it was not difficult for that to work the metamorphosis.  It has worked many others in this world.

The Maitres Soneurs initiates us into forest life, so full of mysterious visions.  In opposition to the sedentary, stay-at-home life of the inhabitant of plains, with his indolent mind, we have the free-and-easy humour of the handsome and adventurous muleteer, Huriel, with his love of the road and of all that is unexpected.  He is a cheminau before the days of M. Richepin.

I do not know any stories more finished than these.  They certainly prove that George Sand had the artistic sense, a quality which has frequently been denied her.  The characters in these stories are living and active, and at the same time their psychology is not insisted upon, and they do not stand out in such relief as to turn our attention from things, which, as we know, are more important than people in the country.  We are surrounded on all sides by the country, and bathed, as it were, in its atmosphere.  And yet, in spite of all this, the country is not once described.  There is not one of those descriptions so dear to the heart of those who are considered masters in the art of word-painting.  We do not describe those things with which we live.  We are content to have them ever present in our mind and to be in constant communion with them.  Style is, perhaps, the sovereign quality in these stories.  Words peculiar to the district are introduced just sufficiently to give an accent.  Somewhat old-fashioned expressions are employed, and these prove the survival of by-gone days, which, in the country, are respected more than elsewhere.  Without any apparent effort, the narrative takes that epic form so natural to those who, as aedes of primitive epochs, or story-tellers by country firesides, give their testimony about things of the past.

I am aware that George Sand has been accused of tracing portraits of her peasants which were not like them.  This is so absurd that I do not consider it worth while to spend time in discussing it.  It would be so easy to show that in her types of peasants there is more variety, and also more reality, than in Balzac’s more realistic ones.  Without being untruthful portraits, it may be that they are somewhat flattered, and that we have more honest, delicate and religious peasants in these stories than in reality.  This may be so, and George Sand warns us of this herself.  It was her intention to depict them thus.