rown, and said to myself: 'Bah, it will cool
him.'

"I therefore ran up to the women to separate them, and all I received
was scratches and bites. Good Lord, what creatures! Well, it took me
five minutes, and perhaps ten, to separate those two viragoes. When I
turned round, there was nothing to be seen, and the water was as smooth
as a lake. The others yonder kept shouting: 'Fish him out!' It was all
very well to say that, but I cannot swim and still less dive!

"At last the man from the dam came, and two gentlemen with boat-hooks,
but it had taken over a quarter of an hour. He was found at the bottom
of the hole in eight feet of water, as I have said, but he was dead,
the poor little man in his linen suit! There are the facts, such as I
have sworn to. I am innocent, on my honor."

The witnesses having deposed to the same effect, the accused was
acquitted.

[1] A preparation of several kinds of fish, with a sharp sauce.

LOVE

THREE PAGES FROM A SPORTSMAN'S BOOK

I have just read among the general news in one of the papers a drama of
passion. He killed her and then he killed himself, so he must have
loved her. What matters He or She? Their love alone matters to me; and
it does not interest me because it moves me or astonishes me, or
because it softens me or makes me think, but because it recalls to my
mind a remembrance of my youth, a strange recollection of a hunting
adventure where Love appeared to me, as the Cross appeared to the early
Christians, in the midst of the heavens.

I was born with all the instincts and the senses of primitive man,
tempered by the arguments and the restraints of a civilized being. I am
passionately fond of shooting, yet the sight of the wounded animal, of
the blood on its feathers and on my hands, affects my heart so as
almost to make it stop.

That year the cold weather set in suddenly toward the end of autumn,
and I was invited by one of my cousins, Karl de Rauville, to go with
him and shoot ducks on the marshes, at daybreak.

My cousin was a jolly fellow of forty, with red hair, very stout and
bearded, a country gentleman, an amiable semi-brute, of a happy
disposition and endowed with that Gallic wit which makes even
mediocrity agreeable. He lived in a house, half farmhouse, half
chateau, situated in a broad valley through which a river ran. The
hills right and left were covered with woods, old manorial woods where
magnificent trees still remained, and where the rares