I remember this ceremony, spacious as a season, which has been regularly staged here so many times in the course of my childhood and youth, and with almost the same rites and forms.

It was like this last year, and the other years, and a century ago and centuries since.
Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted.

Rags, shapeless and colorless--the color of time--cover the eternal man of the fields.

He is what he always was.

He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his cap in his hand because what he sees is so like a church service.