He preferred not to go down the wild cherry avenue, celebrated for its beauty, which guarded the Bastians' property. The people of the little town, the few workers in the neighbouring country, although they were few, would have recognised the manufacturer's son going to the Mayor of Alsheim's. He followed the trimmed blackthorn hedge, which bounded the alley, walking on the red earth or on the narrow border of grass left by the plough at the edge of the ditch. Behind him the noise of the flails in the barn followed him, fading in the distance and scattered by the wind. Jean asked himself: "How shall I approach M. Bastian? How will he receive me? Bah! I arrive; I am supposed to be ignorant of much!"
Two hundred yards to the south of the farm the avenue of wild cherries ended, and the grove, which one saw from so far off, bordered the sown fields. The wood was composed of fine old trees, oaks, planes, and elms, at this time bare of leaves--under which evergreen trees had grown up: pines, spindletrees, and laurels. Jean continued to follow the hedge as it curved across a field of lucerne to a rustic gate, with worn paint and half rotten, which rose between two jambs. A piece of sandstone thrown across the ditch served as a bridge. The laurel-trees growing out over the fence of blackthorn on each side of the upright posts, closed in the view at two yards. When Jean came near, a blackbird flew off, uttering a warning note. Jean remembered that to enter one had only to pass one's hand through the hedge and to lift an iron hook. So he opened the door, and, a little uneasy at his audacity, grazed from his coat to his gaiters by the overgrown branches of an alley far too narrow and hardly ever entered, he came out on to a sanded space, passed several clumps of shrubs edged with box, and arrived at the house on the far side from Alsheim. Here there were plane-trees more than a hundred years old, planted in a semi-circle, which sheltered a tiny lawn and spread their branches over the tiles of an old, low, squat house, from which two balconies projected, topped with overhanging roofs. Store-rooms, presses, barns, and a bee-hive formed the continuation of the master's house, where abundance, good nature, and the simplicity of the old Alsatian homely spirit were in evidence. Jean, kept back for a moment by the irresistible attraction of these places, once so familiar to him, looked at the plane-trees, the roof, a window with a balcony on which ivy grew. He was going to take the few steps which separated him from the half-open door, when on the threshold a tall man appeared, and recognising the visitor made a sign of surprise. It was M. Xavier Bastian. No man of sixty years of age in the division of Erstein was more robust or of a more youthful turn of mind. He had wide shoulders, a massive head, as wide below as above, quite white hair, divided in short locks overlapping each other, his cheeks and the upper lip shaven, the nose large, the eyes fine and grey, the mouth thickset, and on his countenance the sort of prepossessing pride of those who have never known fear of anything. He wore the long frock-coat to which many notable Alsatians remained faithful, even in the villages such as Alsheim, where the inhabitants have no special costume or any memory of having had any.