e for snails when it rains. I had to tug hard on
the crooked wire before I heard a faint jingle issuing in response from
the cure's cavernous kitchen, whose hooded chimney and stone-paved floor
I love to paint.

Now came the klop-klop of a pair of sabots--then the creak of a heavy
key as it turned over twice in the rusty lock, and his faithful Marie
cautiously opened the garden door. I do not know how old Marie is,
there is so little left of this good soul to guess by. Her small
shrunken body is bent from age and hard work. Her hands are heavy--the
fingers gnarled and out of proportion to her gaunt thin wrists. She has
the wrinkled, leathery face of some kindly gnome. She opened her eyes in
a sort of mute appeal as I inquired if Monsieur le Cure was at home.

"Ah! My poor monsieur, his reverence will see no one"--she
faltered--"_Ah! Mais_"--she sighed, knowing that I knew the change in
her master and the gossip thereof.

"My good Marie," I said, persuasively patting her bony shoulder, "tell
his reverence that I _must_ see him. Old friends as we are--"

"_Bon Dieu, oui!_" she exclaimed after another sigh. "Such old friends
as you and he--I will go and see," said she, and turned bravely back
down the path that led to his door while I waited among the roses.

A few moments later Marie beckoned to me from the kitchen window.

"He will see you," she whispered, as I crossed the stone floor of the
kitchen. "He is in the little room," and she pointed to a narrow door
close by the big chimney, a door provided with old-fashioned little
glass panes upon which are glued transparent chromos of wild ducks.

I knocked gently.

"_Entrez!_" came a tired voice from within.

I turned the knob and entered his den--a dingy little box of a room,
sunk a step below the level of the kitchen, with a smoke-grimed ceiling
and corners littered with dusty books and pamphlets.

He was sitting with his back to me, humped up in a worn arm-chair,
before his small stove, just as Tanrade had found him. As I edged around
his table--past a rack holding his guns, half-hidden under two
dilapidated game bags and a bicycle tyre long out of service, he turned
his hollow eyes to mine, with a look I shall long remember, and feebly
grasped my outstretched hand.

"Come," said I, "you're going to get a grip on yourself, _mon ami_.
You're going to get out of this wretched, unkempt state of melancholia
at once. Tanrade has told me much. You know as well as