ery severe reprimand from the president.

The witness Gaudry, who succeeds him, is a small, wretched-looking man,
with a false and timid eye, who exhausts himself in bows and scrapes.
Quite different from Ribot, he seems to have forgotten every thing. It
is evident he is afraid of committing himself. He praises the count; but
he does not speak the less well of M. de Boiscoran. He assures the court
of his profound respect for them all,--for the ladies and gentlemen
present, for everybody, in fine.

The woman Courtois, who comes next, evidently wishes she were a thousand
miles away. The president has to make the very greatest efforts to
obtain, word by word, her evidence, which, after all, amounts to next to
nothing.

Then follow two farmers from Brechy, who have been present at the
violent altercation which ended in M. de Boiscoran's aiming with his gun
at Count Claudieuse.

Their account, interrupted by numberless parentheses, is very obscure.
One of the counsel of the defendant requests them to be more explicit;
and thereupon they become utterly unintelligible. Besides, they
contradict each other. One has looked upon the act of the accused as a
mere jest: the other has looked upon it so seriously as to throw himself
between the two men, in order to prevent M. de Boiscoran from killing
his adversary then and there.

Once more the accused protests, energetically, he never hated Count
Claudieuse: there was no reason why he should hate him.

The obstinate peasant insists upon it that a lawsuit is always a
sufficient reason for hating a man. And thereupon he undertakes to
explain the lawsuit, and how Count Claudieuse, by stopping the water of
the Seille, overflowed M. de Boiscoran's meadows.

The president at last stops the discussion, and orders another witness
to be brought in.

This man swears he has heard M. de Boiscoran say, that, sooner or later,
he would put a ball into Count Claudieuse. He adds, that the accused
is a terrible man, who threatened to shoot people upon the slightest
provocation. And, to support his evidence, he states that once before,
to the knowledge of the whole country, M. de Boiscoran has fired at a
man.

The accused undertakes to explain this. A scamp, who he thinks was no
one else but the witness on the stand, came every night and stole his
tenants' fruit and vegetables. One night he kept watch, and gave him a
load of salt. He does not know whether he hit him. At all events, the
thie