The Equinox (Volume I, Number VII)

THE WOODCUTTER PLACIDE GERVEZ was a woodcutter, like his father and grandfather before him. It is to be supposed that Nature was weary of the procession, for Placide had never married, but lived alone in his hut in the forest of Fontainebleau, just too far from the borders for it ever to be worth his while to go into a village for a drink except on very special occasions. He had even been overlooked for military service; and the Prussians had come and gone without interfering with his chopping. He could not read or write, and his language had many less than half a thousand words. In such conditions he deserved his Christian name. In the forest even an hour calms the most turbulent spirit; a day will cure most worries ; and a week with an axe may be recommended to neurasthenics as more than the equivalent of the most expensive Weir-Mitchell treatment and rest-cures If fashionable doctors could afford to be honest, they would order work-cures for nine—tenths of their patients. Forty-eight years with an axe in the forest had turned Placide Gervez into a mixture of Stoic, Cynic, and Epicurean; he boasted the simplicity and fortitude of each in respect of pain, propriety, and pleasure. The droning hum ofthe forest, broken rarely by the birds—— magpie, crow, cuckoo, and nightingale—meant nothing to him in the summer; nor did the monotonous drip depress him in the winter. The ringing thud of his axe and the crash of the VIII E 8]