ferers, and installed himself in the prettiest _chalet_
at half price, announcing his design to pass the winter at Spinbronn.

* * * * *

(Here lawyer Bremer slowly absorbed an ample pinch of snuff as if to
quicken his reminiscences; he shook his laced ruff with his finger
tips and continued:)

* * * * *

Five or six years before the Revolution of 1789, a young doctor of
Pirmesens, named Christian Weber, had gone out to San Domingo in the
hope of making his fortune. He had actually amassed some hundred
thousand francs m the exercise of his profession when the negro revolt
broke out.

I need not recall to you the barbarous treatment to which our
unfortunate fellow countrymen were subjected at Haiti. Dr. Weber had
the good luck to escape the massacre and to save part of his fortune.
Then he traveled in South America, and especially in French Guiana. In
1801 he returned to Pirmesens, and established himself at Spinbronn,
where Dr. Haselnoss made over his house and defunct practice.

Christian Weber brought with him an old negress called Agatha: a
frightful creature, with a flat nose and lips as large as your fist,
and her head tied up in three bandanas of razor-edged colors. This
poor old woman adored red; she had earrings which hung down to her
shoulders, and the mountaineers of Hundsrueck came from six leagues
around to stare at her.

As for Dr. Weber, he was a tall, lean man, invariably dressed in a
sky-blue coat with codfish tails and deerskin breeches. He wore a hat
of flexible straw and boots with bright yellow tops, on the front of
which hung two silver tassels. He talked little; his laugh was like a
nervous attack, and his gray eyes, usually calm and meditative, shone
with singular brilliance at the least sign of contradiction. Every
morning he fetched a turn round about the mountain, letting his horse
ramble at a venture, whistling forever the same tune, some negro
melody or other. Lastly, this rum chap had brought from Haiti a lot of
bandboxes filled with queer insects--some black and reddish brown, big
as eggs; others little and shimmering like sparks. He seemed to set
greater store by them than by his patients, and, from time to time, on
coming back from his rides, he brought a quantity of butterflies
pinned to his hat brim.

Scarcely was he settled in Haselnoss's vast house when he peopled the
back yard with outlandish birds--Barbary geese