the gentleman presently. I'm telling you the whole story from the
beginning."

"Oh, thank you," murmured the child, with a delighted expression.
However, she remained thoughtful, evidently struggling with some great
difficulty to which she could find no explanation. At last she spoke.

"But what had the poor man done," she asked, "that he was sent away and
put in the ship?"

Lisa and Augustine smiled. They were quite charmed with the child's
intelligence; and Lisa, without giving the little one a direct reply,
took advantage of the opportunity to teach her a lesson by telling her
that naughty children were also sent away in boats like that.

"Oh, then," remarked Pauline judiciously, "perhaps it served my cousin's
poor man quite right if he cried all night long."

Lisa resumed her sewing, bending over her work. Quenu had not listened.
He had been cutting some little rounds of onion over a pot placed on the
fire; and almost at once the onions began to crackle, raising a clear
shrill chirrup like that of grasshoppers basking in the heat. They gave
out a pleasant odour too, and when Quenu plunged his great wooden spoon
into the pot the chirruping became yet louder, and the whole kitchen was
filled with the penetrating perfume of the onions. Auguste meantime was
preparing some bacon fat in a dish, and Leon's chopper fell faster
and faster, and every now and then scraped the block so as to gather
together the sausage-meat, now almost a paste.

"When they got across the sea," Florent continued, "they took the man to
an island called the Devil's Island,[*] where he found himself amongst
others who had been carried away from their own country. They were
all very unhappy. At first they were kept to hard labour, just like
convicts. The gendarme who had charge of them counted them three times
every day, so as to be sure that none were missing. Later on, they were
left free to do as they liked, being merely locked up at night in a big
wooden hut, where they slept in hammocks stretched between two bars.
At the end of the year they went about barefooted, as their boots were
quite worn out, and their clothes had become so ragged that their flesh
showed through them. They had built themselves some huts with trunks
of trees as a shelter against the sun, which is terribly hot in those
parts; but these huts did not shield them against the mosquitoes, which
covered them with pimples and swellings during the night. Many of them
died,