If
you don't think that is fine, I do. It is only one of many cases right
under my eyes.
There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work were
over, who are in the fields working like boys. There is our
blacksmith--old Pere Marie--lame with rheumatism, with his
white-haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. He
cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife
carrying the lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called
"Missy," who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting
behind, "because," as he says, "she is so much company." The old
blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at
Konigsburg. He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone
at my gate and talk of 1870. Like all Frenchmen of his type he is
wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader.
Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of
which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to
pronounce my name. It is usually something illuminating about the
Germans, when it is not something prophetic.
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