and
arbitrator in all their differences.

Between three and four daily, at Costecalde the gunsmith's, a stout
stern pipe-smoker might be seen in a green leather-covered arm-chair in
the centre of the shop crammed with cap-poppers, they all on foot and
wrangling. This was Tartarin of Tarascon delivering judgement--Nimrod
plus Solomon.

III. "Naw, naw, naw!" The general glance protracted upon the good town.

AFTER the craze for sporting, the lusty Tarascon race cherishes one
love: ballad-singing. There's no believing what a quantity of ballads
is used up in that little region. All the sentimental stuff turning into
sere and yellow leaves in the oldest portfolios, are to be found in full
pristine lustre in Tarascon. Ay, the entire collection. Every family has
its own pet, as is known to the town.

For instance, it is an established fact that this is the chemist
Bezuquet's family's:

"Thou art the fair star that I adore!"

The gunmaker Costecalde's family's:

"Would'st thou come to the land Where the log-cabins rise?"

The official registrar's family's:

"If I wore a coat of invisible green, Do you think for a moment
I could be seen?"

And so on for the whole of Tarascon. Two or three times a week there
were parties where they were sung. The singularity was their being
always the same, and that the honest Tarasconers had never had an
inclination to change them during the long, long time they had been
harping on them. They were handed down from father to son in the
families, without anybody improving on them or bowdlerising them:
they were sacred. Never did it occur to Costecalde's mind to sing
the Bezuquets', or the Bezuquets to try Costecalde's. And yet you may
believe that they ought to know by heart what they had been singing for
two-score years! But, nay! everybody stuck to his own,and they were all
contented.

In ballad-singing, as in cap-popping, Tartarin was still the foremost.
His superiority over his fellow-townsmen consisted in his not having
any one song of his own, but in knowing the lot, the whole, mind you!
But--there's a but--it was the devil's own work to get him to sing them.

Surfeited early in life with his drawing-room successes, our hero
preferred by far burying himself in his hunting story-books, or spending
the evening at the club, to making a personal exhibition before a Nimes
piano between a pair of home-made candles. These musical parades seemed
beneath him. Nevertheless, at w