of
slender wooden bars on the top of a kind of zinc trough, and forthwith
began to kill the pigeons. His knife flashed rapidly in his fingers,
as he seized the birds by the wings, stunned them by a blow on the head
from the knife-handle, and then thrust the point of the blade into their
throats. They quivered for an instant, and ruffled their feathers as
Marjolin laid them in a row, with their heads between the wooden bars
above the zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop. He
repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the
blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he
broke the birds' skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards
like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid
them down dead on the other. Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing
rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening eyes, squatting
there like a huge delighted bull-dog enjoying the sight of slaughtered
vermin. "Tick-tack! Tick-tack!" whilst his tongue clucked as an
accompaniment to the rhythmical movements of his knife. The pigeons hung
down like wisps of silken stuff.

"Ah, you enjoy that, don't you, you great stupid?" exclaimed Cadine.
"How comical those pigeons look when they bury their heads in their
shoulders to hide their necks! They're horrid things, you know, and
would give one nasty bites if they got the chance." Then she laughed
more loudly at Marjolin's increasing, feverish haste; and added: "I've
killed them sometimes myself, but I can't get on as quickly as he does.
One day he killed a hundred in ten minutes."

The wooden frame was nearly full; the blood could be heard falling into
the zinc trough; and as Claude happened to turn round he saw Florent
looking so pale that he hurriedly led him away. When they got
above-ground again he made him sit down on a step.

"Why, what's the matter with you?" he exclaimed, tapping him on the
shoulder. "You're fainting away like a woman!"

"It's the smell of the cellar," murmured Florent, feeling a little
ashamed of himself.

The truth was, however, that those pigeons, which were forced to swallow
tares and salt water, and then had their skulls broken and their throats
slit, had reminded him of the wood-pigeons of the Tuileries gardens,
strutting over the green turf, with their satiny plumage flashing
iridescently in the sunlight. He again heard them cooing on the arm
of the marble wrestler amidst