ight
buy him of Pere Manseau. One day his wife saw that the dog was fond of
me, so she herself took a sudden violent fancy to him. The dog, mind
you, could not bear her. Oh, animals know people by instinct! If you
really care for them, they find it out in a moment. I had a gold coin,
a twenty-franc piece, sewed into the band of my skirt; so I spoke to M.
Manseau: 'Dear sir, I meant to offer you my year's savings for your dog;
but now your wife has a mind to keep him, although she cares very little
about him, and rather than that, will you sell him to me for twenty
francs? Look, I have the money here.'

"'No, no, little woman,' he said; 'put up your twenty francs. Heaven
forbid that I should take their money from the poor! Keep the dog; and
if my wife makes a fuss about it, you must go away.'

"His wife made a terrible to-do about the dog. Ah! _mon Dieu_! any one
might have thought the house was on fire! You never would guess the
notion that next came into her head. She saw that the little fellow
looked on me as his mistress, and that she could only have him against
his will, so she had him poisoned; and my poor spaniel died in my
arms.... I cried over him as if he had been my child, and buried him
under a pine-tree. You do not know all that I laid in that grave. As I
sat there beside it, I told myself that henceforward I should always be
alone in the world; that I had nothing left to hope for; that I should
be again as I had been before, a poor lonely girl; that I should never
more see a friendly light in any eyes. I stayed out there all through
the night, praying God to have pity on me. When I went back to the
highroad I saw a poor little child, about ten years old, who had no
hands.

"'God has heard me,' I thought. I had prayed that night as I had never
prayed before. 'I will take care of the poor little one; we will beg
together, and I will be a mother to him. Two of us ought to do better
than one; perhaps I should have more courage for him than I have for
myself.'

"At first the little boy seemed to be quite happy, and, indeed, he would
have been hard to please if he had not been content. I did everything
that he wanted, and gave him the best of all that I had; I was his slave
in fact, and he tyrannized over me, but that was nicer than being alone,
I used to think! Pshaw! no sooner did the little good-for-nothing know
that I carried a twenty-franc piece sewed into my skirtband than he cut
the stitches, and stol