e de Dieu! is it then a king that we are going to settle?
For a simple numskull of a shepherd are so many words necessary? Come!
20,000 francs out of the Heritage to the one of us who shall first cut
him off: I'll say to him in good faith, 'Pick up your head.'"

"And I, 'Swim my friend,'" cried the advocate, laughing like the gap
of a pourpoint.

And then they went to supper, the captain to his wench, and the
advocate to the house of a jeweller's wife, of whom he was the lover.

Who was astonished? Chiquon! The poor shepherd heard the planning of
his death, although the two cousins had walked in the parvis, and
talked to each other as every one speaks at church when praying to
God. So that Chiquon was much coupled to know if the words had come up
or if his ears had gone down.

"Do you hear, Mister Canon?"

"Yes," said he, "I hear the wood crackling in the fire."

"Ho, ho!" replied Chiquon, "if I don't believe in the devil, I believe
in St. Michael, my guardian angel; I go there where he calls me."

"Go, my child," said the canon, "and take care not to wet yourself,
nor to get your head knocked off, for I think I hear more rain, and
the beggars in the street are not always the most dangerous beggars."

At these words Chiquon was much astonished, and stared at the canon;
found his manner gay, his eye sharp, and his feet crooked; but as he
had to arrange matters concerning the death which menaced him, he
thought to himself that he would always have leisure to admire the
canon, or to cut his nails, and he trotted off quickly through the
town, as a little woman trots towards her pleasure.

His two cousins having no presumption of the divinatory science, of
which shepherds have had many passing attacks, had often talked before
him of their secret goings on, counting him as nothing.

Now one evening, to amuse the canon, Pille-grue had recounted to him
how had fallen in love with him a wife of a jeweller on whose head he
had adjusted certain carved, burnished, sculptured, historical horns,
fit for the brow of a prince. The good lady was to hear him, a right
merry wench, quick at opportunities, giving an embrace while her
husband was mounting the stairs, devouring the commodity as if she was
swallowing a a strawberry, only thinking of love-making, always
trifling and frisky, gay as an honest woman who lacks nothing,
contenting her husband, who cherished her so much as he loved his own
gullet; subtle as a perfume, so m