Lesson in the smallness of the world, for
what should come up the village street but that monstrous Barrel, and
we could see by its movements that it was still quite full.
We gathered round the peasant, and told him how grieved we were at his
ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the people of the Barrois
were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such a song. He took
his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by, and there
he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness
suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger
than sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood
from which tyrants and martyrs are carved. Then suddenly he changed
and became eloquent:
'Oh, the good wine! If only it were known and tasted! ... Here, give
me a cup, and I will ask some of you to taste it, then at least I
shall have it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine I have
carried more than a hundred miles, and everywhere it has been
refused!'
There was one guttering candle on a little stool. The roof of the shed
was lost up in the great height of darkness; behind, in the darkness,
the oxen champed away steadily in the manger.
