at he had been attacked by him and had had
great, difficulty in defending himself.

The sergeant cried:

"Come, get up!"

But "Bell" could not move. He did his best to raise himself on his
crutches, but without success. The police, thinking his weakness
feigned, pulled him up by main force and set him between the crutches.

Fear seized him--his native fear of a uniform, the fear of the game
in presence of the sportsman, the fear of a mouse for a cat-and by the
exercise of almost superhuman effort he succeeded in remaining upright.

"Forward!" said the sergeant. He walked. All the inmates of the farm
watched his departure. The women shook their fists at him the men
scoffed at and insulted him. He was taken at last! Good riddance! He
went off between his two guards. He mustered sufficient energy--the
energy of despair--to drag himself along until the evening, too dazed to
know what was happening to him, too frightened to understand.

People whom he met on the road stopped to watch him go by and peasants
muttered:

"It's some thief or other."

Toward evening he reached the country town. He had never been so far
before. He did not realize in the least what he was there for or what
was to become of him. All the terrible and unexpected events of the last
two days, all these unfamiliar faces and houses struck dismay into his
heart.

He said not a word, having nothing to say because he understood nothing.
Besides, he had spoken to no one for so many years past that he
had almost lost the use of his tongue, and his thoughts were too
indeterminate to be put into words.

He was shut up in the town jail. It did not occur to the police that he
might need food, and he was left alone until the following day. But when
in the early morning they came to examine him he was found dead on the
floor. Such an astonishing thing!

THE RABBIT

Old Lecacheur appeared at the door of his house between five and a
quarter past five in the morning, his usual hour, to watch his men going
to work.

He was only half awake, his face was red, and with his right eye open
and the left nearly closed, he was buttoning his braces over his fat
stomach with some difficulty, at the same time looking into every corner
of the farmyard with a searching glance. The sun darted its oblique rays
through the beech trees by the side of the ditch and athwart the apple
trees outside, and was making the cocks crow on the dunghill, and the
pigeons coo o