by
the way. Yes, that suffices. In a bag, you know--and soon!"

Returning across the Vieux Port in the bateau mouche, Monsieur Peloux no
longer shuddered in dread of crime to be committed--his shuddering was
for accomplished crime. On his bald head, unheeded, the gushing tears of
shame accumulated in pools.

* * * * *

When leaves of absence permitted him to make retirements to his coquette
little estate at Les Martigues, the Major Gontard was as another
Cincinnatus: with the minor differences that the lickerish cookings of
the brave Marthe--his old femme de menage: a veritable protagonist among
cooks, even in Provence--checked him on the side of severe simplicity;
that he would have welcomed with effusion lictors, or others, come to
announce his advance to a regiment; and that he made no use whatever of
a plow.

In the matter of the plow, he had his excuses. His two or three acres of
land lay on a hillside banked in tiny terraces--quite unsuited to the
use of that implement--and the whole of his agricultural energies were
given to the cultivation of flowers. Among his flowers, intelligently
assisted by old Michel, he worked with a zeal bred of his affection for
them; and after his workings, when the cool of evening was come, smoked
his pipe refreshingly while seated on the vine-bowered estrade before
his trim villa on the crest of the slope: the while sniffing with a just
interest at the fumes of old Marthe's cookings, and placidly delighting
in the ever-new beauties of the sunsets above the distant mountains and
their near-by reflected beauties in the waters of the Etang de Berre.

Save in his professional relations with recalcitrant inhabitants of
Northern Africa, he was of a gentle nature, this amiable warrior: ever
kindly, when kindliness was deserved, in all his dealings with mankind.
Equally, his benevolence was extended to the lower orders of
animals--that it was understood, and reciprocated, the willing jumping
of the Shah de Perse to his friendly knee made manifest--and was
exhibited in practical ways. Naturally, he was a liberal contributor to
the funds of the Societe protectrice des animaux; and, what was more to
the purpose, it was his well-rooted habit to do such protecting as was
necessary, on his own account, when he chanced upon any suffering
creature in trouble or in pain.

Possessing these commendable characteristics, it follows that the doings
of the Major Gonta