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Night is the time when all three, hemp-beaters, grave-diggers, and ghosts, principally exercise their callings. At night, too, the hemp-beater tells his harrowing tales. May I be pardoned for a slight digression.
When composing La Mare au Diable, in 1846, Madame Sand looked forward to writing a series of such peasant tales, to be collectively entitled Les Veillées du Chanvreur, the hemp-beaters being, as will be recollected, the Scheherazades of each village.
So the child-squire romped on equal terms with the little rustics of Nohant, sharing their village sports and the occupations of the seasons as they came round: hay-making and gleaning in summer; in winter weaving bird-nets to spread in the snowy fields for the wholesale capture of larks; anon listening with mixed terror and delight to the picturesque legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they sat at their work out of doors on September moonlight evenings to all the traditional ghost-stories of the "Black Valley," as she fancifully christened the country round about.
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