empty. Not a sack, not a grain of wheat, not a speck of flour dust on the walls. Even that good warm smell that rises from ground wheat and fills the nostrils—of it there was no trace. In one corner, a broken wooden bed; on the window sill, some crusts of dry bread; and then, in another corner, four or five sacks full of holes, from which spilled white sand.

That—that was Master Cornille's secret. Those were the sacks he loaded on his donkey's back and paraded along the village roads every evening, to save the honor of his mill and to make people believe that work there was going on. Poor mill, and poor Master Cornille! The steam mill and its owners had robbed them of their customers long ago; the millstones turned and turned, but on emptiness.

The boy and the girl came back and, weeping, told me what they had seen. My heart nearly broke. I did not waste a minute, but went straightaway to the neighbors and explained the matter to them in two words, and we agreed to carry to Master Cornille's mill, that very hour, all the wheat in our houses. The news spread through the village, and in no time the whole village marched out in a long procession of donkeys loaded with wheat—but this was real wheat.

The door stood open on both its leaves, and Master Cornille was sitting on a stone, his head in his hands, weeping with grief. He had realized that some rogue had taken advantage of his absence and his forgetting the ladder outside, had got into the mill and laid bare his secret. He was crying out and lamenting his lot, saying:

"O my shame! Nothing is left me but to die, after what has befallen my mill!"

And he called the mill by loving names, as though he were speaking to a real person.

At that moment the donkeys reached the yard, and we all began shouting as we used to in the great days of the windmills, and unloading the sacks, while Master Cornille opened his eyes wide and, with his dry, veined hand, took up and gathered a handful here and a handful there, wanting to laugh and weeping instead, and saying:

"Wheat—wheat—by God Almighty, wheat! Let me look my fill at it!"

Then he turned his face to us

and said: "I knew you would come back to me. Those people from the capital are all thieves."

*

From that day on we never left Master Cornille without work. Then, a year and some months later, the old man died, and the sails of our windmills stopped—this time forever. What would you have? We must under-stand, sir, that everything has an end, and resign ourselves to it: the age of the windmills has gone, never to return, along with all the beautiful things that were of old and have passed away.

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