pille, cast a little further than an ordinary one, and
rigged up with a float like a raft, carrying a little clapper. The fish
rang their own knell as they took the hook.

"It's rattling like mad!" cried Jupille, "and you don't stir! I couldn't
have thought it of you, Monsieur Flamaran."

He ran past us, brandishing a landing-net as a warrior his lance; he
might have been a youth of twenty-five. We followed, less keen and also
less confident than he. He was right, though; when he drew up his line,
the float of which was disappearing in jerks, carrying the bell along
with it beneath the water, he brought out a fair-sized jack, which he
declared to be a giant.

He let it run for some time, to tire it, and to prolong the pleasure of
playing it.

"Gentlemen," he cried, "it is cutting my finger off!"

A stroke from the landing-net laid the monster at our feet, its strength
all spent. It weighed rather under four pounds. Jupille swore to six.

My learned tutor and I sat down again side by side, but the thread of
our conversation had been broken past mending. I tried to talk of her,
but M. Flamaran insisted on talking of me, of Bourges, of his election
as professor, and of the radically distinct characteristics by which you
can tell the bite of a gudgeon from that of a stickleback.

The latter part of this lecture was, however, purely theoretical, for he
got up two hours before sunset without having hooked a fish.

"A good day, all the same," he said. "It's a good place, and the fish
were biting this morning. We'll come here again some day, Jupille; with
an east wind you ought to catch any quantity of gudgeons." He kept pace
beside me on our way home, but wearied, no doubt, with long sitting,
with the heat, and the glare from the water, fell into a reverie, from
which the incidents of the walk were unable to rouse him.

Jupille trotted before us, carrying his rod in one hand, a
luncheon-basket and a fish-bag in the other. He turned round and gave us
a look at each cross-road, smiled beneath his heavy moustache, and went
on faster than before. I felt sure that something out of the way was
about to happen, and that the silent quill-driver was tasting a quiet
joke.

I had not guessed the whole truth.

At a turn of the road M. Flamaran suddenly pulled up, looked all around
him, and drew a deep breath.

"Hallo, Jupille! My good sir, where are you taking us? If I can believe
my eyes, this is the Chestnut Knoll, down yo