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lams, since he is eighty-four and too old to go to sea. "_Ah, malheur!_" he sighs wearily, lifting his cap with a trembling hand as seamed and tough as his tarpaulin. "Ah, the bad luck," he repeats in a thin, husky voice. "I would not have deranged monsieur, but _bon Dieu_, I am hungry. I have had no bread since yesterday. It is a little beast this hunger, monsieur. There are no clams--I have searched from the great bank to Tocqueville." It is surprising how quick Suzette can heat the milk. The old man is now seated in her kitchen before a cold duck of the cure's killing and hot coffee--real coffee with a stiff drink of applejack poured into it, and there is bread and cheese besides. Like hungry men, he eats in silence and when he has eaten he tells me his dog is dead--that woolly sheep dog of his with a cast in one fishy green eye. "_Oui_, monsieur," confided the old man, "he is dead. He was all I had left. It is not gay, monsieur, at eighty-four to lose one's last friend--to have him poisoned." "Who poisoned him?" I inquired hotly--"was it Bonvin the butcher? They say it was he poisoned both of Madame Vinet's cats." "_Eh, ben!_" he returned, and I saw the tears well up into his watery blue eyes--"one should not accuse one's neighbours, but they say it was he, monsieur--they say it was in his garden that Hector found the bad stuff--there are some who have no heart, monsieur." "Bonvin!" I cried, "so it was that pig who poisoned him, eh? and you saved his little girl the time the _Belle Marie_ foundered." "_Oui_, monsieur--the time the _Belle Marie_ foundered. It is true I did--we did the best we could! Had it not been for the fog and the ebb tide I think we could have saved them all." He fell to eating again, cutting into the cheese discreetly--this fine old gentleman of the sea. It is a pity that some one has not poisoned Bonvin I thought. A short thick fellow, is Bonvin, with cheeks as red as raw chops and small eyes that glitter with cruelty. Bonvin, whose youngest child--a male, has the look and intelligence of a veal and whose mother weighs one hundred and five kilos--a fact which Bonvin is proud of since his first wife, who died, was under weight despite the fact that the Bonvins being in the business, eat meat twice daily. I have always believed the veal infant's hair is curled in suet. Its face grows purple after meals. * * * * * A rough old place is my v
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