"Sais pas. J' n'aime pas les choses mortes--ca saigne--et ca n' sent
pas bon--ca m'fait mal au coeur." (Don't know. I'm not fond of dead
things. They bleed--and they don't smell nice--it makes me sick.)

And two or three times a day would Barty receive some costly token
of this queer old giant's affection, till he got quite unhappy about
it. He feared he was despoiling the House of Laferte of all its
treasures in silver and gold; but he soothed his troubled conscience
later on by giving them all away to favorite boys and masters at
Brossard's--especially M. Bonzig, who had taken charge of his white
mouse (and her family, now quite grown up--children and
grandchildren and all) when Mlle. Marceline went for her fortnight's
holiday. Indeed, he had made a beautiful cage for them out of wood
and wire, with little pasteboard mangers (which they nibbled away).

Well, the men of the party and young Laferte and I would go off with the
dogs and keepers into the forest--and Barty would pick filberts and
fruit with Jeanne and Marie, and eat them with bread-and-butter and jam
and _cernaux_ (unripe walnuts mixed with salt and water and
verjuice--quite the nicest thing in the world). Then he would find his
way into the heart of the forest, which he loved--and where he had
scraped up a warm friendship with some charcoal-burners, whose huts were
near an old yellow-watered pond, very brackish and stagnant and deep,
and full of leeches and water-spiders. It was in the densest part of the
forest, where the trees were so tall and leafy that the sun never fell
on it, even at noon. The charcoal-burners told him that in '93 a young
de la Tremblaye was taken there at sunset to be hanged on a giant
oak-tree--but he talked so agreeably and was so pleasant all round that
they relented, and sent for bread and wine and cider and made a night of
it, and didn't hang him till dawn next day; after which they tied a
stone to his ankles and dropped him into the pond, which was called "the
pond of the respite" ever since; and his young wife, Claire Elisabeth,
drowned herself there the week after, and their bones lie at the bottom
to this very day.

And, ghastly to relate, the ringleader in this horrible tragedy was
a beautiful young woman, a daughter of the people, it seems--one
Seraphine Doucet, whom the young viscount had betrayed before
marriage--le droit du seigneur!--and but for whom he would have been
let off after that festive night. Ten or fif