her: 'Hold your tongue, Melie. Let
them alone, let them alone; we shall see.'

"Well, we fastened Delila under the willows and had landed and were
fishing side by side, Melie and I, close to the two others. But here,
monsieur, I must enter into details.

"We had only been there about five minutes when our neighbor's line
began to jerk twice, thrice; and then he pulled out a chub as thick as
my thigh; rather less, perhaps, but nearly as big! My heart beat, the
perspiration stood on my forehead and Melie said to me: 'Well, you sot,
did you see that?'

"Just then Monsieur Bru, the grocer of Poissy, who is fond of gudgeon
fishing, passed in a boat and called out to me: 'So somebody has taken
your usual place, Monsieur Renard?' And I replied: 'Yes, Monsieur Bru,
there are some people in this world who do not know the rules of common
politeness.'

"The little man in linen pretended not to hear, nor his fat lump of a
wife, either."

Here the president interrupted him a second time: "Take care, you are
insulting the widow, Madame Flameche, who is present."

Renard made his excuses: "I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon; my anger
carried me away. Well, not a quarter of an hour had passed when the
little man caught another chub, and another almost immediately, and
another five minutes later.

"Tears were in my eyes, and I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with
rage, for she kept on nagging at me: 'Oh, how horrid! Don't you see
that he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch
anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why, my hands are tingling,
just to think of it.'

"But I said to myself: 'Let us wait until twelve o'clock. Then this
poacher will go to lunch and I shall get my place again. As for me,
Monsieur le President, I lunch on that spot every Sunday. We bring our
provisions in Delila. But there! At noon the wretch produced a chicken
in a newspaper, and while he was eating, he actually caught another
chub!

"Melie and I had a morsel also, just a bite, a mere nothing, for our
heart was not in it.

"Then I took up my newspaper to aid my digestion. Every Sunday I read
the Gil Blas in the shade by the side of the water. It is Columbine's
day, you know; Columbine, who writes the articles in the Gil Blas.
I generally put Madame Renard into a rage by pretending to know this
Columbine. It is not true, for I do not know her and have never seen
her, but that does not matter. She writes very wel