wrung her hands, and tried to turn her head to look at the bottom of the
room, and suddenly la Rapet disappeared at the foot of the bed. She took
a sheet out of the cupboard and wrapped herself up in it; she put the
iron pot onto her head, so that its three short bent feet rose up like
horns, and she took a broom in her right hand and a tin pail in her
left, which she threw up suddenly, so that it might fall to the ground
noisily.

And certainly when it came down, it made a terrible noise; then,
climbing onto a chair, the nurse lifted up the curtain which hung at the
bottom of the bed, and showed herself, gesticulating and uttering shrill
cries into the pot which covered her face, while she menaced the old
peasant woman, who was nearly dead, with her broom.

Terrified, with a mad look on her face, the dying woman made a
superhuman effort to get up and escape; she even got her shoulders and
chest out of bed; then she fell back with a deep sigh. All was over, and
la Rapet calmly put everything back into its place; the broom into the
corner by the cupboard, the sheet inside it, the pot on the hearth, the
pail on the floor and the chair against the wall. Then, with
professional movements, she closed the dead woman's enormous eyes, put
a plate on the bed and poured some holy water into it, dipped the twig
of boxwood into it, and kneeling down, she fervently repeated the
prayers for the dead, which she knew by heart, as a matter of business.

And when Honore returned in the evening, he found her praying, and he
calculated immediately that she had made twenty sous out of him, for she
had only spent three days and one night there, which made five francs
altogether, instead of the six which he owed her.

EPIPHANY

"Ah!" said Captain Count de Garens, "I should rather think that I do
remember it, that supper of the Kings, during the war!

"I was at the time quarter-master of cavalry, and for a fortnight had
been lurking about as a scout in front of the German advanced guard. The
evening before we had cut down a few Uhlans and had lost three men, one
of whom was that poor little Raudeville. You remember Joseph de
Raudeville well, of course.

"Well, on that day my captain ordered me to take six troopers and to go
and occupy the village of Porterin, where there had been five fights in
three weeks, and to hold it all night. There were not twenty houses left
standing, not a dozen houses in that wasp's nest. So I took te