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It stands on a bank, in a prominent position, by the roadside; a rude contrast to the surrounding scenery. Presently there comes up an old cantonnier in a blouse and heavy sabots, who has just returned from mending the roads; he takes off his cap, crosses himself devoutly, and kneels down to pray.
Next I passed a bare-footed cantonnier breaking stones, and he told me that if I made haste I might reach Neuvic before dark.
At length I thought I had had enough of his company, so at the next bend in the road I came to a stand beside a heap of stones that a cantonnier had neatly piled up in geometrical pattern. There I waited, and the animal came on gaily, little expecting to find himself suddenly at close quarters with me. Just as he turned the corner he raised a howl that said he was both surprised and shocked.
The road becomes more hilly, and a short distance out of Blamont, behold, it is as though a chalk-line were made across the roadway, on the west side of which it had been swept with scrupulous care, and on the east side not swept at all; and when, upon passing the next roadman, I notice that he bears not upon his cap the brass stencil-plate bearing the inscription, " Cantonnier," I know that I have passed over the frontier into the territory of Kaiser Wilhelm.
My companion, who was a handsome fellow, with a moustache that one would expect to see upon the face of a Sicilian brigand, was a cantonnier, and as he scraped out the ditches and mended the roads, his donkey browsed upon what he could find along the wayside. In summer and winter they were inseparable companions, and had come to thoroughly understand one another.
Excepting an occasional cantonnier at work by the roadside, or a peasant woman minding her cows, the region is utterly deserted. Tiny hamlets lie half hidden in the folds of the hills or skirting the edges of the lower mountain slopes; none border the way. During the long winter these fine roads, winding between steep precipices and abrupt rocks, are abandoned on account of the snow.
It is probable that I should have chosen my words with more circumspection had I guessed what an important person he was; but as he wore a blouse, and was squatting upon a heap of stones which he had been pulling about, I underestimated his dignity. That he united the functions of cantonnier and garde did not occur to me.
The cantonnier confided to me that he was formerly employed in the phosphate quarries, and that he had closed his experience in this line by working three months without wages for an Englishman whose speculation turned out a failure.
At last he came upon a broader road which bore unmistakable signs of military workmanship in its construction, and here he met, and passed with laconic greeting, a few peasant women returning with empty baskets from some neighbouring market; or perhaps a "cantonnier" here and there, plodding home with "sabots" swinging heavily and round shoulders bent beneath the burden of his weighty stone-breaking implements.
Hither ascended a cantonnier when the new road was made up the valley, and here he found chipped flints of primeval man, a polished celt, a scrap of Samian ware, and in a niche at the side sealed up with stalactite, a tiny earthenware pitcher 2-1/2 inches high, a leaden spindle-whorl, some shells, and a toy sheep-bell.
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