"I am growing young as at the time of my own marriage. It was the year of the comet in which they made such good wine before the great Russian winter; you have heard them talk of that, Frederick; all our soldiers were frozen."
She liked to recall those old stories, and we did not think that we should soon see the same things.
The good people of Phalsbourg, the poorest, such as father Maigret, old Paradis, grandfather Lafougére, all of them old soldiers without any means of subsistence but public charity and their medal of St. Helena, began to come to look for mushrooms in the woods; they knew all the different kinds from the small to the large Polish mushroom; they gathered also strawberries and mulberries. The wood strawberries, which are the best, sell in the town for two sous a quart, mushrooms for three sous the small basketful.
The lower meadow, by the river bank, gave them also quantities of salad. How many times those poor old backs were forced to stoop in order to earn a _sou_!
And every year we received orders to enforce the forest laws more severely, to prevent the poor from picking up the dead leaves and beech nuts, which was as much as to say to "prevent them from living."
Things went on this way till the hay-making season, when came the great drought; it lasted till the end of July, and we feared for the potatoes.
As to the _plebiscite_, I won't talk to you about that; those things did not worry us foresters much. One fine morning we received the order to go to the Petite Pierre, and all the brigade, after assembling at my house, left together in their holiday clothes to vote; yes, as we had been ordered to do. Then, stopping at the inn of the Three Pigeons, we drank a bumper to the Emperor's health, after which every one went home and never thought of it any more.
The people complained of but one thing at Graufthal, Dôsenheim, and Echbourg, and that was the lack of rain. But in the depths of the valleys dry weather was always the most beautiful and the richest; we never lacked moisture; the grass grew in abundance, and all the birds in Alsace, blackbirds, thrushes, bullfinches, and wood pigeons, with their young nestlings, enjoyed themselves with us as if in an aviary.