Pagina 538 de 896

Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at

secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he

slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as

his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses,

gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads,

to be so much air as against this figure. And when he lifted his

eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in his

small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to

centres all over France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of

brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering

lumps of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun

changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was

glowing. Then, the mender of roads having got his tools together

and all things ready to go down into the village, roused him.