hout Aristide struggling somehow south to visit _ses vieux_, as he
affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a few smiles on
him, one or two at least were sure to find their way to Aigues-Mortes in
the shape of, say, a silver-mounted umbrella for his father or a deuce
of a Paris hat for the old lady's Sunday wear. Monsieur and Madame Pujol
had a sacred museum of these unused objects--the pride of their lives.
Aristide was entirely incomprehensible, but he was a good son. A bad son
in France is rare.

But once Aristide nearly killed his old people outright. An envelope
from him contained two large caressive slips of bluish paper, which when
scrutinized with starting eyes turned out to be two one-thousand-franc
notes. Mon Dieu! What had happened? Had Aristide been robbing the Bank
of France? They stood paralyzed and only recovered motive force when a
neighbour suggested their reading the accompanying letter. It did not
explain things very clearly. He was in Aix-les-Bains, a place which they
had never heard of, making his fortune. He was staying at the Hotel de
l'Europe, where Queen Victoria (they had heard of Queen Victoria) had
been contented to reside, he was a glittering figure in a splendid
beau-monde, and if _ses vieux_ would buy a few cakes and a bottle of vin
cachete with the enclosed trifle, to celebrate his prosperity, he would
deem it the privilege of a devoted son. But Pujol senior, though
wondering where the devil he had fished all that money from, did not
waste it in profligate revelry. He took the eighty pounds to the bank
and exchanged the perishable paper for one hundred solid golden louis
which he carried home in a bag curiously bulging beneath his woollen
jersey and secreted it with the savings of his long life in the mattress
of the conjugal bed.

"If only he hasn't stolen it," sighed the mother.

"What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?" said the
old man. "No one can find it."

The Provencal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish
miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative
effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more
preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the
world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition,
accounts for a singular number of things and _inter alia_ for my
dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.

Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not