The Red Cockade

And yet there were signs, even then, to be read by those with eyes, that foretold something, if but a tithe of the inconceivable future; of which signs I myself remarked sufficient by the way next day to fill my mind with other thoughts than private resentment; with some nobler aims than self-assertion. Riding to Cahors, with Gil and André at my back, I saw not only the havoc caused by the great frosts of the winter and spring, not only walnut trees blackened and withered, vines stricken, rye killed, a huge proportion of the land fallow, desert, gloomy and unsown: not only those common signs of poverty to which use had accustomed me–though on my first return from England I had viewed them with horror–mud cabins, I mean, and unglazed windows, starved cattle, and women bent double, gathering weeds. But I saw other things more ominous; a strange herding of men at cross-roads and bridges, where they waited for they knew not what; a something lowering in these men's silence, a something expectant in their faces; worst of all, a something dangerous in their scowling eyes and sunken cheeks. Hunger had pinched them; the elections had roused them. I trembled to think of the issue, and that in the hint of danger I had given St. Alais, I had been only too near the mark.