ory which requires the very smallest capital. The
workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-loft,
and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law in the
matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make the first
rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere Fourchon and his
satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his natural daughters, came
from the otters; and then there were breakfasts and dinners given them
by peasants who could neither read nor write, and were glad to use the
old fellow's talents when they had a bill to make out, or a letter to
dispatch. Besides all this, he knew how to play the clarionet, and
he went about with his friend Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to
village weddings and the grand balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.

Vermichel's name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so generally
used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of Soulanges, was
in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called Vermichel,
practitioner. Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian regiment of
former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in recognition of certain
services, a situation as practitioner, which in remote country-places
usually devolves on those who are able to sign their name. Pere Fourchon
therefore added to his other avocations that of witness, or practitioner
of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet came to draw them in the
districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy. Vermichel and Fourchon,
allied by a friendship of twenty years' tippling, might really be
considered a business firm.

Mouche and Fourchon, bound together by vice as Mentor and Telemachus
by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father, "panis
angelorum,"--the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory had
retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the Grand-I-Vert,
and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in their busiest
and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to make as much as
three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first place, no dealer
within a radius of fifty miles would have trusted his tow to either
Mouche or Fourchon. The old man, surpassing the miracles of modern
chemistry, knew too well how to resolve the tow into the all-benignant
juice of the grape. Moreover, his triple functions of public wri