onless.

"They brought the poor girl in with both legs broken. She will never walk
again.

"Jean, wild with remorse and also possibly touched with gratitude, made
up his mind to marry her.

"There you have it, old man."

It was growing dusk. The young woman felt chilly and wanted to go home,
and the servant wheeled the invalid chair in the direction of the
village. The painter walked beside his wife, neither of them having
exchanged a word for an hour.

This story appeared in Le Gaulois, December 17, 1883.

A VAGABOND

He was a journeyman carpenter, a good workman and a steady fellow,
twenty-seven years old, but, although the eldest son, Jacques Randel had
been forced to live on his family for two months, owing to the general
lack of work. He had walked about seeking work for over a month and had
left his native town, Ville-Avary, in La Manche, because he could find
nothing to do and would no longer deprive his family of the bread they
needed themselves, when he was the strongest of them all. His two sisters
earned but little as charwomen. He went and inquired at the town hall,
and the mayor's secretary told him that he would find work at the Labor
Agency, and so he started, well provided with papers and certificates,
and carrying another pair of shoes, a pair of trousers and a shirt in a
blue handkerchief at the end of his stick.

And he had walked almost without stopping, day and night, along
interminable roads, in sun and rain, without ever reaching that
mysterious country where workmen find work. At first he had the fixed
idea that he must only work as a carpenter, but at every carpenter's shop
where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account
of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his resources,
he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the
road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter; he split
wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up
fagots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only
obtained two or three days' work occasionally by offering himself at a
shamefully low price, in order to tempt the avarice of employers and
peasants.

And now for a week he had found nothing, and had no money left, and
nothing to eat but a piece of bread, thanks to the charity of some women
from whom he had begged at house doors on the road. It was getting dark,
and Jacques Randel,