be long; I play for four."

"White all round!" said one of the hags.

"Domino!" cried the Saint-Esteve. "I win; you have four points between
you two, and the whites are all out. Well, my dear, what is it?" she
said, turning to her nephew, after a rather stormy reckoning among the
witches was over.

"You, Madame Fontaine," said the chief of police, addressing one of the
venerable beings, whose head was covered with disorderly gray hair and
a battered green bonnet,--"you neglect your duty; you have sent me no
report, and, on the contrary, I get many complaints of you. The prefect
has a great mind to close your establishment. I protect you on account
of the services you are supposed to render us; but if you don't render
them, I warn you, without claiming any gifts of prediction, that your
fate-shop will be shut up."

"There now!" replied the pythoness, "you prevented me from hiring
Mademoiselle Lenormand's apartment in the rue de Tournon, and how can
you expect me to make reports about the cooks and clerks and workmen and
grisettes who are all I get where I am? If you had let me work among the
great folks, I'd make you reports and plenty of them."

"I don't see how you can say that, Madame Fontaine," said Madame de
Saint-Esteve. "I am sure I send you all my clients. It was only the
other day," continued the matrimonial agent, "I sent you that Italian
singer, living with a deputy who is against the government; why didn't
you report about that?"

"There's another thing," said the chief of police, "which appears
in several of the complaints that I received about you,--that nasty
animal--"

"What, Astaroth?" said Madame Fontaine.

"Yes, that batrachian, that toad, to come down to his right name. It
seems he nearly killed a woman who was pregnant--"

"Well, well," interrupted the sorceress, "if I am to tell fortunes
alone, you might as well guillotine me at once. Because a fool of a
woman lay-in with a dead child, must toads be suppressed in nature? Why
did God make them?"

"My dear woman," said the chief, "did you never hear that in 1617 a
learned man was put to death for having a toad in a bottle?"

"Yes, I know that; but we are not in those light ages," replied Madame
Fontaine, facetiously.

"As for you, Madame Nourrisson, the complaint is that you gather your
fruit unripe. You ought to know by this time the laws and regulations,
and I warn you that everything under twenty-one years of age is
forbidden. I won