M. Bouquet had known Mistral well. I had come to Provence a few years too late to meet him, but M. Bouquet said, "At any rate, you must meet Charloun."

So it happened that one afternoon, returning from a tramp over the hills, I found waiting in the courtyard a slim little old man, with bright, soft eyes, a short gray beard, and slouch hat, a farmer in dress though not in build. Charloun Riéu!

We talked of Mistral, of St. Trophime at Arles, of the resemblance of Provence to Greece. Then I whistled a bar from Au Moulin d'Oli, a song of Charloun's, the soft lilt of which I found especially entrancing. "Play it for me," he said, motioning toward the piano through the open door. So then we started, I softly playing the languorous melody while he sang the words in his gentle, piping tenor, like those old men in the Iliad on the walls of Troy-of the mill for pressing olive oil, and the bench beside it bathed in sunlight, fit for a summer afternoon's repose. "I have a better one," he said, and recited the words of a more thrilling song of a mill where he was to meet his beloved.

"We must not forget Mistral," said Charloun. I took down M. Bouquet's song book, and we all-M. Bouquet and Madame Bouquet herself, who so seldom came out of the kitchen-joined in the ringing verses of the Cansoun de la Coupo, the Marseillaise of Provence, song of an ancient people, proud and free.—

D'un viei pople fièr e libre,

Which is, beyond all doubt, the most spirited national air ever created.

Then we sang the very old songs of the pays: children's songs, such as Quand te coustèron tis esclop? (How much did they cost you, your wooden shoes?) No children's songs can equal those of France, as anyone knows who has heard Yvette Guilbert. Some of the best come from Provence. We ended with Magali, the most tender of all serenades, and, like all songs of Provence, with a gentle dignity even when most intense.

O Magali, ma tant amando,
Mete la testo au fenestroun!
Escouto un pau aquesto aubado
De tambourin e de viouloun.

(Oh Magali, my beloved, come to the window, listen a little to this song of tambourine and violin.)

Long after Charloun had left that evening, the recollection of this prompted Madame Bouquet to talk to me of love in Provence. "You know we have an old motto, 'One must become well acquainted before falling in love'," she said. "But (with a twinkle in her eye as she knitted, and a sharp grimace) I fear we are not pratiques. The sun is too much in our blood."

The sun is in the poems of Charloun. Before I met him again I had read all of his poems I could find in the library of M. Bouquet. His verses were like himself, belonging to the farms and fields, full-flavored yet sensitive. He wrote of the things he knew-the country fêtes and markets, great white oxen and chirping cicadas, almond and olive orchards; but always with nature as a background for people. I read his Cansoun d'ou Terraire (Songs of the Soil) and his translation of the Odyssey. (The Odyssey he loved, calling it his Mediterranean epic; but he would have found Theocritus's Idylls or the Georgics of Virgil better suited to his powers.) Like the old troubadours, he sang chiefly of love. Mediæval Provence, for all its intensity, cultivated a technique of restraint in the ritual of love; to the troubadours love was a cult, a religion, with its own laws and formalities. I found that Charloun had inherited from them their patience and delicacy, but in place of their sentimentality and sophistication he expressed his own directness and simplicity.

He sees a girl bent over a wayside brook, washing clothes, the breeze stirring her petticoat so that her ankles gleam in the sun. The blood rushes to his head-"Coume pousqué resta tranquile? (How could one remain serene?)" The breeze dies down, he goes on, quietly driving home. He sees the first violets in spring, the birds building their nests, a shepherdess and shepherd, lizards sunning themselves, a boy and girl gathering roses; and he asks his love why she is not smiling when all nature is so glad.

Vène, te culirai li proumièri vióuleto:

Toun sourrire enfantouli,

Lou veirai mai respeli.

(Come, I'll gather for you the first violets; your child-like smile I shall see flower again.)

And finally he concludes impulsively:

Ma douço amigo!

Oh! digo, digo:

Tu, se me vos,
Laisso toun bos;
Se pièi t'agrado,
Dedins la prado,
Vène emé iéu:

Moun cor es tiéu.

(My sweet friend, oh! tell me, tell me, if you wish me leave your wood, and, if it pleases you, come with me in the field, my heart is yours.)

“Me parles plus, Rouseto" (Speak to me no more, Rosette) is a song after Theocritus. He comes upon a girl doing the family washing. She is in water to her knee. It is spring. The refrain is a haunting, hopeless one: "Speak to me no more, speak to me no more, Rosette, for in speaking you reawaken my love."

Me parles plus, me parles plus, Rouseto,
Qu'en me parlant revihes mis amour.

At an August fête at Moriès a girl will not dance. She has an Arlésienne coiffure, built high with lace, with a bright blue ribbon and a rose. To the boys who ask she says, "I am only listening to the violin." When men whisper to her that she is beautiful, she lowers her eyes on looks at the stars.

He is sad, having seen a girl by the brook. Moon, sun, birds' songs no longer delight him.

La tant douço aureto

'Mé soun dous murmur,
Beisant li floureto

Fai plus moun bounur.

(The breeze so sweet which kisses the flowers with caressing murmur does not make me happy any longer.)

The lovely girl who was his joy has gone far away, to pluck other flowers. Since then he has lost all joy, all love.

Desempiéi siéu sènso
De joio e d'amour.

I saw him once again, at his home in Paradou. It was in the early evening, before I took the train for Arles. "Where shall I find Charloun?" I asked people near the church. “At the café, or his home, là-bas." He was not at the café, where he was accustomed to meet his friends and sing with them, but I continued along the poplar-shaded road and soon had the house where he lived pointed out to me by eager and curious townsmen. It was back of a wayside well, a peasant's tenement in the middle of a stucco row. He was sitting alone in the twilight, holding a copy of L'Homme de Bronze, the newspaper of the félibrige movement, in his hands, but not reading. The room gave evidence that Charloun, like many another good poet, had married Mistress Poverty. A farmer's house, but right for him who pretended to nothing more, this "lover and priest of the earth”.

He told me the simple annals of his life, of his blacksmith grandfather and farmer father, both of whom were natives of Paradou. During his fifty-six years he had had no schooling except a little Latin and less Greek from the village curé. Like Walther von der Vogelweide, he was by Nature taught. He recalled the great day when he first met Mistral, and how the master had said, "Charloun is the only peasant who sings of his plough and knows how to sing of it." He had never married. "I spend my time singing at the fêtes," he said. "We have many of them in Provence."

He asked me for American music, to which he would set Provençal words. I gave him the wide choice of Suwanee River, Yankee Doodle and Lord Jeffrey Amherst! While I was writing the musical notation on a scrap of his own paper, he took his pen and wrote me an original little quatrain of farewell.

We sang a few songs together before I left to take my train. I shall not forget him, standing there in his doorway, a Rembrandtesque figure, waving me adieu. I hoped it was only au revoir, but in March two years later I saw in the papers that he had fallen one evening and died of exposure. Now the lover and priest of the earth is one with the herbs and flowers he loved. I received a black-bordered funeral notice from Madame Bouquet. The race of the Magi was no more. In the cité morte had died the last of her princes.

A GOOD WORD FOR THE PURITAN

BY MARGARET SHERWOOD

It is difficult to share to the full the rejoicing of a new school of literature in this country which joyously proclaims that, in part by bringing in new racial influences from many lands, it has broken down our narrow race inhibitions and moral scruples, and has prepared the way for a triumphant escape from Puritanism. The tables have been almost too thoroughly turned. Indubitably our Puritan forefathers, some of them at least, did their share of persecuting, but so great a castigation has the Puritan been receiving of late years that one feels inclined to take up the cudgels in his defense. In these contemporary jibes and denunciations there is lack of reference to any specific Puritan or Puritans, but, through large generalizations, a phantom is created, flitting across the pages of novel and criticism, an arch-oppressor, with meaningless harshness in his face, holding grotesque beliefs, denying himself and others the joys of life for the mere pleasure of the denial. Doubtless the typical Puritan (for I will generalize even as these others) had his harsh aspects, with his stern theology and his stern ideals of conduct, yet I am not sure that he was not a better man and a deeper thinker than his modern critic.

It is a pity that, so far as the printed word is concerned, the Puritan expressed himself for the most part only along the lines of theology; after all he probably did not think about theology all the time. I dare say he had many weeks and months of enjoyable hard work, wholly absorbed in his toil; I dare say he had his hours of comfort by the household fire, with his children at his knees, and no thought of hell in his mind. He was doubtless more human than posterity has thought. Again, it is a pity that in modern allusions to him the most unfortunate aspects of his theology have been the most stressed; human attention is most quickly caught by the bizarre. As to his convictions, man's thought is in every age liable to error, conceivably even in this.