big gray mullet with cream sauce, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts
soaked in wine, some salt-marsh lamb as tender as cake, vegetables which
melted in the mouth and nice hot pancake which was brought on smoking
and spreading a delicious odor of butter.

They drank new, sweet, sparkling cider and heady red wine, and after
each course they whetted their appetites with some old apple brandy.

The devil drank and ate to his heart's content; in fact he took so much
that he was very uncomfortable, and began to retch.

Then Saint Michael arose in anger and cried in a voice like thunder:
"What! before me, rascal! You dare--before me--"

Satan, terrified, ran away, and the saint, seizing a stick, pursued him.
They ran through the halls, turning round the pillars, running up the
staircases, galloping along the cornices, jumping from gargoyle to
gargoyle. The poor devil, who was woefully ill, was running about madly
and trying hard to escape. At last he found himself at the top of the
last terrace, right at the top, from which could be seen the immense
bay, with its distant towns, sands and pastures. He could no longer
escape, and the saint came up behind him and gave him a furious kick,
which shot him through space like a cannonball.

He shot through the air like a javelin and fell heavily before the town
of Mortain. His horns and claws stuck deep into the rock, which keeps
through eternity the traces of this fall of Satan.

He stood up again, limping, crippled until the end of time, and as he
looked at this fatal castle in the distance, standing out against the
setting sun, he understood well that he would always be vanquished in
this unequal struggle, and he went away limping, heading for distant
countries, leaving to his enemy his fields, his hills, his valleys and
his marshes.

And this is how Saint Michael, the patron saint of Normandy, vanquished
the devil.

Another people would have dreamed of this battle in an entirely
different manner.

A NEW YEAR'S GIFT

Jacques de Randal, having dined at home alone, told his valet he might
go out, and he sat down at his table to write some letters.

He ended every year in this manner, writing and dreaming. He reviewed
the events of his life since last New Year's Day, things that were now
all over and dead; and, in proportion as the faces of his friends rose
up before his eyes, he wrote them a few lines, a cordial New Year's
greeting on the first of January.

So he sa