Explore "Old Amable" by Guy de Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The grey rainy sky seemed to press down on the vast brown plain. The scents of autumn, the melancholy scents of bare wet earth, fallen leaves and dead flowers, made the stagnant evening air duller and heavier. The peasants were still working, scattered through the fields, and waiting for the hour of Angelus: it would recall them to the farms whose thatched roofs showed here and there through the branches of the bare trees that sheltered the orchards from the wind.
At the edge of a road, a very small child sat on a heap of clothes, legs apart, playing with a potato that every now and then he let fall into his frock, while five women, bent double, with rumps in the air, were setting out colza seedlings in the nearby field. Moving slowly and methodically all down the big trench that the plough had just turned up, they thrust in a pointed wooden stick; the plant, already a little withered and lying limply over on its side, was thrust into the hole; then they covered up the root and went on with their work.