taciturn peasants, to those plains of the Campine which the tourist avoids as he would remorse.
Braving hurricanes and tempests, he was out in all weathers.
In the full autumn drizzle he often stood watching a peasant pacing the fields with long steps, and sowing with a full and rhythmic gesture. In summer, a reaper gravely sharpening his scythe on the grindstone held him fast, like one of the faithful watching a symbolic episode of the divine office. He wandered about all the villages near Willeghem, where he had seen that vision, often returned to the same place, but always suffering from the same vague shame, did not dare approach the sculptural peasant.
He was deeply moved, too, by the slight odor of manure, that April evening when a peasant walked about with his pail sprinkling his tardy soil with ladle-fulls. The contempt of this rustic for the tender, delicate spring, the phlegm of this large-breeched, tanned, tow-headed peasant busying himself with his inelegant, but useful job, the violent contrast between the substantial lout and the ambient archness of the season conquered Laurent Paridael there and then, and in the same minute, the view that he had been enjoying seemed insipid and sophisticated. He could but look at the young farmer. This same rustic, accosted by Laurent, stopped mixing his compound and stimulating the soil, and brightening up, spoke to Laurent quite simply as he scratched his ear:
"Yes, Monsieur, four of us, all like me, made our first communion the same day that we were drawn for service!"
And this coincidence of the holy sacrament with the brutal conscription never left Laurent's brain, and
