ll yourself?"

He answered: "Simon."

"Simon what?" retorted the other.

The child, altogether bewildered, repeated: "Simon."

The lad shouted at him: "You must be named Simon something! That is not
a name--Simon indeed!"

And he, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time:

"I am named Simon."

The urchins began laughing. The lad triumphantly lifted up his voice:
"You can see plainly that he has no papa."

A deep silence ensued. The children were dumfounded by this
extraordinary, impossibly monstrous thing--a boy who had not a papa;
they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt
rising in them the hitherto inexplicable pity of their mothers for La
Blanchotte. As for Simon, he had propped himself against a tree to
avoid falling, and he stood there as if paralyzed by an irreparable
disaster. He sought to explain, but he could think of no answer for
them, no way to deny this horrible charge that he had no papa. At last
he shouted at them quite recklessly: "Yes, I have one."

"Where is he?" demanded the boy.

Simon was silent, he did not know. The children shrieked, tremendously
excited. These sons of toil, nearly related to animals, experienced the
cruel craving which makes the fowls of a farmyard destroy one of their
own kind as soon as it is wounded. Simon suddenly spied a little
neighbor, the son of a widow, whom he had always seen, as he himself
was to be seen, quite alone with his mother.

"And no more have you," he said, "no more have you a papa."

"Yes," replied the other, "I have one."

"Where is he?" rejoined Simon.

"He is dead," declared the brat with superb dignity, "he is in the
cemetery, is my papa."

A murmur of approval rose amid the scape-graces, as if the fact of
possessing a papa dead in a cemetery made their comrade big enough to
crush the other one who had no papa at all. And these rogues, whose
fathers were for the most part evil-doers, drunkards, thieves, and
ill-treaters of their wives hustled each other as they pressed closer
and closer to Simon as though they, the legitimate ones, would stifle
in their pressure one who was beyond the law.

The lad next Simon suddenly put his tongue out at him with a waggish
air and shouted at him:

"No papa! No papa!"

Simon seized him by the hair with both hands and set to work to
demolish his legs with kicks, while he bit his cheek ferociously. A
tremendous struggle ensued between the two boys, and Simon f