ead--there's nothing
better for your body."

He called everyone his son-in-law, though he had no daughter, either
married or to be married.

Well known indeed was Toine Burnt-Brandy, the stoutest man in all
Normandy. His little house seemed ridiculously small, far too small and
too low to hold him; and when people saw him standing at his door, as
he did all day long, they asked one another how he could possibly get
through the door. But he went in whenever a customer appeared, for it
was only right that Toine should be invited to take his thimbleful of
whatever was drunk in his wine shop.

His inn bore the sign: "The Friends' Meeting-Place"--and old Toine
was, indeed, the friend of all. His customers came from Fecamp and
Montvilliers, just for the fun of seeing him and hearing him talk; for
fat Toine would have made a tombstone laugh. He had a way of chaffing
people without offending them, or of winking to express what he didn't
say, of slapping his thighs when he was merry in such a way as to make
you hold your sides, laughing. And then, merely to see him drink was a
curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him, his roguish eyes
twinkling, both with the enjoyment of drinking and at the thought of
the money he was taking in. His was a double pleasure: first, that of
drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash.

You should have heard him quarrelling with his wife! It was worth paying
for to see them together. They had wrangled all the thirty years they
had been married; but Toine was good-humored, while his better-half grew
angry. She was a tall peasant woman, who walked with long steps like a
stork, and had a head resembling that of an angry screech-owl. She spent
her time rearing chickens in a little poultry-yard behind the inn, and
she was noted for her success in fattening them for the table.

Whenever the gentry of Fecamp gave a dinner they always had at least one
of Madame Toine's chickens to be in the fashion.

But she was born ill-tempered, and she went through life in a mood of
perpetual discontent. Annoyed at everyone, she seemed to be particularly
annoyed at her husband. She disliked his gaiety, his reputation, his
rude health, his embonpoint. She treated him as a good-for-nothing
creature because he earned his money without working, and as a glutton
because he ate and drank as much as ten ordinary men; and not a day went
by without her declaring spitefully:

"You'd be better in the stye al