The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-05-07


 small, dusty looking donkey to broken
 down kind of cart. In the cart was a
 supply of milk bottles-the neat tin can of our civilized areas is here q thing un-
 known, The donkey had a weary, pa
 tient air, as though he had never known thoroughly rested bones or thoroughly satisfied appetite. The woman, with
 her shabby dress, of which no atom Of
 distinctive color remained beneath the
 fierce onslaughts of the sun, and her big country hat tied about her ears, seemed
 a creature of labor thing of endless and hopeless toll.
 Yet I remember that when l spoke to her she had the quick cheerfulness of
 her race, and all its childish disposition
 toward lotering gossip, Yes-she lived
 there. She was the milk woman of the
 district, driving down at six o'clock ev- cry morning to the little toy station by
 the hotel, more than a mile away, and then climbing all the sloping heights around to carry milk to the tiny huts, or sometimes villas, perched upon them. She got very little by this mode of liv- ing, she said, in her breezy, cheerful
 way, as though it hardly mattered to her. Every one was poor. She had al most always enough for the children and her husband, and she did not look for more. Of herself she did not speak, and I felt that there were times when she and the dusty. patient donkey kept their fast together.
 Then she opened the door of her little shanty and showed me tho interior--a strange, dim place, which had poverty stricken weirdness of it's own A para lyzed man, some years her senior, was sitting near the tiny slit of window with the light falling on his pale face and vacant eyes. This was the husband of whom she spoke On the floor a boy of three or four was eating wild figs, and playing with a battered tin trumpet. This was her youngest child The oth- CT, some years older. was gone to pick mushrooms.
 As she spoke he came in, his basget brimming with zampignans, as he called them in his queer childish patois. These children hardly understood civilized French. They were small and pale, like all southern children, with an un- der-fed air, and big sad eyes They sat munching their figs and handling the toy trumpet with strange, old fashioned solemnity.
 Yes, she said they would be a help to her by and by, when they had done their service and come back to their old home. They could get work in the quarry over the hill, and, when she was too old one of them could help her with the milk.
 Odd, simple dream of rest and con- tent! Only to leave off trudging up the rough hillsides where the cart could go -only to drudge little less bitterly in old age than she had done in youth! To sit in the sun sometimes and stare at the blue sky, and the sea, and be at peace-what a little thing it seems! Who would think that so humble an ambition could never be realized?
 l remember always, when l think of her, the senseess husband staring at us with unmeaning eyes-the two children on the earthen floor playing with the tin trumpet.
 Perhaps 1t was an omen. that tin trumpet.
 I have seen her many times since l then. l have seen her driving down to ! the little station in the cool fresh morn- | illS, Nllli llit HIN DOltitS III SIlIluS l rows behind her; or trudging up the | narrow winding path beset with dan cing cicalas and shining black bees, and | here and there by glorious swallow tailed butterflies like flames of broca- 1 ded gold. Sometimes I have seen her digging in the valley below, where the | melons lie yellow in the sun, and thyme | and southern-wood grow as weeds be- side the way. But, wherever and | whenever I have seen her, she has al ways been at work, and alone.
 She always wears the same dressc-or one like it--faded to the color of the ! brown earth. The same tint She is grayer now than when I first saw her. and her face is scorched and wrinkled into the appearance of extreme old age, | and the vacant husband still sits in the hovei on the hill like a grim speeches. sucking the poor fruit of her labor
 But the tin trumpet has hung on the wall for many a year.
 They went out, those little pickers of and figs, into the world be- yond the sunny herb scented Esterel The elder released from his sfyice drifted away into other paths-going In the end, of course, to swell the ruff fanism of lowest Paris. The younger came back, broken down by fever, pol soned by the deadly miasma of some pestilential African marsh--tbaoiS to the mother whom he was to help, and the little bare hut on the hillside.
 Neither of these two men had ever struck blow at an enemy, Neither lad lifted finger in the defence or his country. Yet both were to die for it-- ,ne, years later, by the hand of the ex- eeutioner-one, only to-day, in the grip ,f disease.
 For the last act in this humble drama l ,nded to-day. As I came through the onely rough road leading through the crest to St. Raphael only an hour ago, heard the cracking of a whip in the tillness, and the rumble of wheels. Presently one of the great stone-carts If the quarry came in sight, rocking tormily among the ruts, and drawn by couple of mules, and l looked up in udden surprise, for upon the high seat, olding the reins in her nlotionleSs ands sat my old mikwoman of the ill.
 Her face was still and gray. and inn