o say: "Do not take me for my bearded friend, little one; I
am a brother."

And I cried, oh, I cried a great deal more than I should if I had not
recognized them, the poor dead fellows.

It was wrong of me to tell you this. Now I am sad and cannot chatter any
longer. Well, good-by, dear Lucy. I send you a hearty kiss. Long live
the mustache!
JEANNE.

MADAME BAPTISTE

The first thing I did was to look at the clock as I entered the
waiting-room of the station at Loubain, and I found that I had to wait
two hours and ten minutes for the Paris express.

I had walked twenty miles and felt suddenly tired. Not seeing anything on
the station walls to amuse me, I went outside and stood there racking my
brains to think of something to do. The street was a kind of boulevard,
planted with acacias, and on either side a row of houses of varying shape
and different styles of architecture, houses such as one only sees in a
small town, and ascended a slight hill, at the extreme end of which there
were some trees, as though it ended in a park.

From time to time a cat crossed the street and jumped over the gutters
carefully. A cur sniffed at every tree and hunted for scraps from the
kitchens, but I did not see a single human being, and I felt listless and
disheartened. What could I do with myself? I was already thinking of the
inevitable and interminable visit to the small cafe at the railway
station, where I should have to sit over a glass of undrinkable beer and
the illegible newspaper, when I saw a funeral procession coming out of a
side street into the one in which I was, and the sight of the hearse was
a relief to me. It would, at any rate, give me something to do for ten
minutes.

Suddenly, however, my curiosity was aroused. The hearse was followed by
eight gentlemen, one of whom was weeping, while the others were chatting
together, but there was no priest, and I thought to myself:

"This is a non-religious funeral," and then I reflected that a town like
Loubain must contain at least a hundred freethinkers, who would have made
a point of making a manifestation. What could it be, then? The rapid pace
of the procession clearly proved that the body was to be buried without
ceremony, and, consequently, without the intervention of the Church.

My idle curiosity framed the most complicated surmises, and as the hearse
passed me, a strange idea struck me, which was to follow it, with the
eight gentl