poignant and
supernatural terror, she heard Patin talking in the room below.

He seemed less angry and he was saying: "Nasty weather! Fierce wind!
Nasty weather! I haven't eaten, damn it!"

She cried through the ceiling: "Here I am, Patin; I am getting your meal
ready. Don't get angry."

She ran down again. There was no one in the room. She felt herself
growing weak, as if death were touching her, and she tried to run and get
help from the neighbors, when a voice near her cried out: "I haven't had
my breakfast, by G--!"

And the parrot in his cage watched her with his round, knowing, wicked
eye. She, too, looked at him wildly, murmuring: "Ah! so it's you!"

He shook his head and continued: "Just you wait! I'll teach you how to
loaf."

What happened within her? She felt, she understood that it was he, the
dead man, who had come back, who had disguised himself in the feathers of
this bird in order to continue to torment her; that he would curse, as
formerly, all day long, and bite her, and swear at her, in order to
attract the neighbors and make them laugh. Then she rushed for the cage
and seized the bird, which scratched and tore her flesh with its claws
and beak. But she held it with all her strength between her hands. She
threw it on the ground and rolled over it with the frenzy of one
possessed. She crushed it and finally made of it nothing but a little
green, flabby lump which no longer moved or spoke. Then she wrapped it in
a cloth, as in a shroud, and she went out in her nightgown, barefoot; she
crossed the dock, against which the choppy waves of the sea were beating,
and she shook the cloth and let drop this little, dead thing, which
looked like so much grass. Then she returned, threw herself on her knees
before the empty cage, and, overcome by what she had done, kneeled and
prayed for forgiveness, as if she had committed some heinous crime.

THE PIECE OF STRING

It was market-day, and from all the country round Goderville the peasants
and their wives were coming toward the town. The men walked slowly,
throwing the whole body forward at every step of their long, crooked
legs. They were deformed from pushing the plough which makes the
left-shoulder higher, and bends their figures side-ways; from reaping the
grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on their feet.
Their starched blue blouses, glossy as though varnished, ornamented at
collar and cuffs with a little embroidered design and