I had seen more of
the quiet and peace of the country than had been my share since
boyhood, and for that reason, or because I had no great taste for
the task before me--the task now so imminent--I felt a little
hipped. In good faith, it was not a gentleman's work that I was
come to do, look at it how you might.
But beggars must not be choosers, and I knew that this feeling
would not last. At the inn, in the presence of others, under the
spur of necessity, or in the excitement of the chase, were that
once begun, I should lose the feeling. When a man is young he
seeks solitude, when he is middle-aged, he flies it and his
thoughts. I made therefore for the 'Green Pillar,' a little inn
in the village street, to which I had been directed at Auch, and,
thundering on the door with the knob of my riding switch, railed
at the man for keeping me waiting.
Here and there at hovel doors in the street--which was a mean,
poor place, not worthy of the name--men and women looked out at
me suspiciously. But I affected to ignore them; and at last the
host came. He was a fair-haired man, half-Basque, half-
Frenchman, and had scanned me well, I was sure, through some
window or peephole; for when he came out he betrayed no surprise
at the sight of a well-dressed stranger--a portent in that out-
of-the-way village--but eyed me with a kind of sullen reserve.
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