The only clothing which the baby-boy can
rightly be said to possess is a white linen cap,
tied tightly round his chubby face. Certainly
there is a something intended for a shirt, but
this flimsy garment is twisted round his neck
in the guise of a collar.

Every time the young mother—for such is
the girl—peeps under the umbrella, baby
makes an attempt to escape, and sometimes
succeeds in scrambling out of his novel cradle,
and having a little escapade in the road, and
a neighbouring ditch; at which it would be
difficult to say whether mother or child is
most diverted. Whilst engaged in one of
these mock eager pursuits, a peasant on horse-
back comes riding up, to whom the mother
gives the child; and it is pretty to see him
stroking the little bare soft limbs with his
great brown hands, and trotting the laughing,
crowing boy backwards and forwards along
the road.

This is one of those bright pictures which
the memory retains we don't know how or
why, and which captivates us at first sight.
And so I find myself returning again and
again to watch the group; before long I am
on friendly terms with the older women—
always ready to gossip—and I have won the
young mother's heart by admiring and playing
with the baby. One day, whilst her boy
slept under the great scarlet umbrella, she
told me the story of her life.

I don't know whether it deserves to be
called a story, for it possesses neither dramatic
nor melo-dramatic incident. I can't help
that, however; I tell it as I found it, the
story of a young fresh life and love; the
absorbing and life-long interest of a sweet
and simple nature.

Marie was the youngest of thirteen children,
twelve of whom had died in early infancy.
She, the thirteenth, though a small delicate
child, had struggled on through childhood to
girlhood, and from thence to motherhood, in
spite of all the prognostications of neighbours
and the fears and forebodings of her parents.

These parents lived in the stone house in
front of which we were sitting; her mother
was the witch-like old woman with the scarlet
petticoat over her head, and her father, bowed
down more with infirmity than old age, was
hobbling about the courtyard and rapping
the pigs, which would get in his way, with
his crutch.

These people, like all the other peasants,
their neighbours, possessed a house and one
or two fields, and a right of pasturing a few
sheep on the hills belonging to their commune.
They also, like all the peasants in the Pyrenees,
lived hardly, fared badly, and grew old
before their time.

Marie's mother had carried all the manure
necessary for their land, tied up in large
sheets, upon her head; because the path
leading to the fields was too steep and
inaccessible for the donkey. And when the hay
was cut, you might have seen a short file of
what looked like huge walking bundles,
tottering down the hill-side. Marie's mother
and her neighbours were carrying the hay
down as they had carried the manure up;
and the neighbours were doing for her to-day
what she would do for all of them in turns.
Then there would be the maize to plant and
to hoe and cut; the flax to grow and
prepare; and, before the long winter set in, an
adequate supply of wood to be procured. If
towards evening you had been walking up
any of the exquisite transverse valleys through
which the noisy rills dash down to join the
main stream, you might have seen a woman,
bent almost double, supporting herself by a
stick, and dragging after her a huge load of
wood, attached to her by means of a broad
band of leather fastened round her head.
She will tell you that she has fetched it from
the forest many miles away, and that she
must make many more such journeys before
the autumn sets in, and the wolves begin to
prowl about.

Think of her hard life and scanty fare and
insufficient clothing, you will scarcely wonder
that fifteen years ago, when she was only
thirty, she was not wrinkled but furrowed,
hard featured, and hard favoured; that her
babies died young; and that petite Marie
(La Petite, as they all call her) is so small
and delicate.

Marie's father has lived an equally laborious
life, and was a broken down man at fifty,
crippled by rheumatism, contracted in the
mountains, where he spends three months in
the summer herding his sheep and goats;
and suffering from all the maladies which
poorness of blood and exposure to all weathers
will engender.

When Marie was only three months old,
one of those calamities happened so frequent
in the Pyrenees. It was winter time, and
three men, who had a large stone barn
between them in a field at some little
distance from the village, had driven in their
sheep, and were giving them fodder for the
night, when the relentless avalanche swept
down and carried away barn and sheep and
men, dashing them over the steep crags,
hurling them on to the sharp stones beneath,
and then covering all with the deep pure
snow garment.

For many days the bodies were not found;
but when at length they were carried home,
the widow of one, who had long been ailing, lay
dead of a broken heart. Husband and wife
were buried together; and their one child,
Gaston, a boy of twelve years old, was left to
inherit the house of his fathers, a miserable
cottage scantily furnished. All their other
worldly possessions—namely, the sheep and
the third share of the barn—had been
destroyed by the avalanche.

Poor Gaston was an orphan and without
relatives; and the wise old men of the village
who met to discuss what could be done for
him, advised, that as his mother had a cousin