r, by many darns, open in front showed a
sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the being called Mouche
was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere Fourchon.

"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet; "if
a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of Paris,
how their tongues would maul him!"

As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with
this episode of his early walk. "Come," said he, quite touched when the
old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you say
you are a famous otter catcher. If you are sure there is an otter down
there--"

From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain
air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on its
surface.

"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the
beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the
water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."

"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the
peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait
and catch the otter."

"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"

"What is your day worth?"

"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old
man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an
enormous overcharge.

The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten,
and I'll give you ten more for the otter."

"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the
sub-prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like;
but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the
otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has a
fine white 'dot' on her back. Come now, my good gentleman, if I may make
so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that stone down
there. If we head the otter off, it will come down stream; for just see
their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their burrow to feed,
for, once full of fish, they know they can easily drift down, the sly
things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I should be living now
on an income; but I was a long time finding out that you must go up
stream very early in the morning if you want to bag the game before
others. Well, somebody threw a spell over me when I was born. However,
we three t