modic
demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the weather.

Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every evening,
for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently come to play
at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a corner and never
stirred. But the moment ten o'clock began to strike on a clock which he
kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at the stroke with the
mechanical precision of the figures which are made to move by springs in
the German toys. He would then advance slowly towards the players, give
them a glance like the automatic gaze of the Greeks and Turks exhibited
on the Boulevard du Temple, and say sternly, "Go away!" There were days
when he had lucid intervals and could give his wife excellent advice
as to the sale of their wines; but at such times he became extremely
annoying, and would ransack her closets and steal her delicacies, which
he devoured in secret. Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their
appearance he would treat them with civility; but as a general thing
his remarks and replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked
him, "How do you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?" "I have grown
a beard," he replied, "have you?" "Are you better?" asked another.
"Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" was the answer. But the greater part of the time
he gazed stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his
wife would say, "The good-man does not hear anything to-day."

On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy; he
flourished his knives and shouted, "That joke dishonors me!"

As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men in
sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the same
respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture. Among
his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet discovered the
object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the community had
learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries. He insisted on
keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in the cellar of his
house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on them. But then the
month of June came round he grew uneasy with the restless anxiety of a
madman about the sale of the sack and the puncheons. Madame Margaritis
could nearly always persuade him that the wine had been sold