ent for making the most of the labor of other people.
Though unfit himself for the execution of any kind of work, no one knew
better how to sell it. His words were a net, in which people found
themselves taken before they were aware. And since he was devoted to
himself alone, and looked on the producer as his enemy, and the buyer as
prey, he used them both with that obstinate perseverance which avarice
teaches.

My father was a slave all the week, and could call himself his own only
on Sunday. The master naturalist, who used to spend the day at the house
of an old female relative, then gave him his liberty on condition that he
dined out, and at his own expense. But my father used secretly to take
with him a crust of bread, which he hid in his botanizing-box, and,
leaving Paris as soon as it was day, he would wander far into the valley
of Montmorency, the wood of Meudon, or among the windings of the Marne.
Excited by the fresh air, the penetrating perfume of the growing
vegetation, or the fragrance of the honeysuckles, he would walk on until
hunger or fatigue made itself felt. Then he would sit under a hedge, or
by the side of a stream, and would make a rustic feast, by turns on
watercresses, wood strawberries, and blackberries picked from the hedges;
he would gather a few plants, read a few pages of Florian, then in
greatest vogue, of Gessner, who was just translated, or of Jean Jacques,
of whom he possessed three old volumes. The day was thus passed
alternately in activity and rest, in pursuit and meditation, until the
declining sun warned him to take again the road to Paris, where he would
arrive, his feet torn and dusty, but his mind invigorated for a whole
week.

One day, as he was going toward the wood of Viroflay, he met, close to
it, a stranger who was occupied in botanizing and in sorting the plants
he had just gathered. He was an elderly man with an honest face; but his
eyes, which were rather deep-set under his eyebrows, had a somewhat
uneasy and timid expression. He was dressed in a brown cloth coat, a gray
waistcoat, black breeches, and worsted stockings, and held an
ivory-headed cane under his arm. His appearance was that of a small
retired tradesman who was living on his means, and rather below the
golden mean of Horace.

My father, who had great respect for age, civilly raised his hat to him
as he passed. In doing so, a plant he held fell from his hand; the
stranger stooped to take it up, and recognize