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“Pouf!” said the Curd, letting out a big sigh as he came to a standstill and mopped his brow. “Had ever poor man such trouble with his flock?– and the thermometer at twenty-eight, too! Advance, my children–you first, Maman Vacher; and Heaven grant the good father here may compose your differences!”

Here the Cure–himself a peasant–flung out both hands as if resigning the case. Pere Philibert, finger on chin, eyed the two disputants with an air of grave abstraction, waiting for one or the other to begin. Brother Marc Antoine leaned back against the apple-tree, and took snuff. His eyes twinkled. Clearly he expected good sport, and I gathered that this was not the first of Ambialet’s social difficulties to be brought up to the Priory for solution.

But for the moment both disputants hung back. The woman–an old crone, with a face like a carved nutcracker–dropped an obeisance and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. The man shifted his weight from foot to foot while he glanced furtively from one to the other of us. I recognised him for Ambialet’s only baker, a black-avised fellow on the youthful side of forty. Clearly, the grave dignity of Pere Philibert abashed them. “Mais allez, donc! Allez!” cried the Curd, much as one starts a team of horses.

Pere Philibert turned slowly on his heel, and, waving a hand once more toward the river, continued his discourse as though it had not been interrupted.

“One might say almost the whole world cannot show its like! To be sure, the historian Herodotus tells us that, when Babylon stood in danger of the Medes, Queen Nitocris applied herself to dig new channels for the Euphrates to make it run crookedly. And in one place she made it wind so that travellers down the river came thrice to the same village on three successive days.”

“Te-te!” interrupted Brother Marc Antoine, with a chuckle. “Wake up, Zephirine–wake up, old lady, and listen to this.” Zephirine, smitten affectionately on the ham, answered only with a short squeal like a bagpipe, and buried her snout deeper in the grass.

“I like that,” the old man went on. “To think of travelling down a river three days’ journey, and putting up each night at the same auberge! Vieux drole d’Herodote! But does he really pitch that yarn, my father?”

“The village, if I remember, was called Arderica, and doubtless its inhabitants were proud of it. Yet we of Ambialet have a better right to be proud, since the wonder that encircles us is not of man’s making but a miracle of God: although,”–and here Pere Philibert swung about and fixed his eyes on the baker–“our local pride in Ambialet and its history, and its institutions and its immemorial customs, are of no moment to M. Champollion, who comes, I think, from Rodez or thereabouts.”

In an instant the old woman had seized on this cue.

“Te! Listen, then, to what the good father calls you!” she shrilled, advancing on the baker and snapping finger and thumb under his nose; “an interloper, a scoundrel from the Rouergue, where all are scoundrels! You with your yeast from Germany! It is such fellows as you that gave the Prussians our provinces, and now you must settle here, turning our stomachs upside down–honest stomachs of Ambialet.”

“Bah!” exclaimed Champollion defiantly. “You!–a sage femme–qui ne fonctionne pas, d’ailleurs!”

So the storm broke, and so for ten good minutes it raged. In the hurly-burly, from the clash and din of winged words, I disengaged something of the true quarrel. Champollion (it seemed) had bought a business and settled down as baker in Ambialet. Now, his predecessor had always bought yeast from the Widow Vacher, next door, who prepared it by an ancient family recipe; but this new-comer had introduced some new yeast of commerce–levure viennoise–and so deprived her of her small earnings. In revenge–so he asserted, and she did not deny it–she had bribed a travelling artist from Paris to decorate the bakery sign with certain scurrilities, and the whole village had conned next morning a list of the virtues of the Champollion yeast and of the things–mostly unmentionable–it was warranted a faire sauter. There were further charges and counter-charges–as that the widow’s Cochin-China cock had been found with its neck wrung; and that she, as sage femme, and the only one in Ambialet, had denied her services to Madame Champollion at a time when humanity should override all private squabbles. Brother Marc Antoine rubbed his hands and repeatedly smote Zephirine on the flank.