y, monsieur." Joseph concluded his story,
"three hours after noon."

"How do you know that?" I asked him.

"There is no doubt about that," he replied.

I did not attempt to make him understand that it could easily happen
that the famished animals had eaten their master, after he had died
suddenly in his hut.

As for the cross on the wall, it had appeared one morning, and no one
knew what hand traced it in that strange color.

Since then no one doubted any longer that the Wandering Jew had died on
this spot.

I myself believed it for one hour.

THE LITTLE CASK

He was a tall man of forty or thereabout, this Jules Chicot, the
innkeeper of Spreville, with a red face and a round stomach, and said by
those who knew him to be a smart business man. He stopped his buggy in
front of Mother Magloire's farmhouse, and, hitching the horse to the
gatepost, went in at the gate.

Chicot owned some land adjoining that of the old woman, which he had
been coveting for a long while, and had tried in vain to buy a score of
times, but she had always obstinately refused to part with it.

"I was born here, and here I mean to die," was all she said.

He found her peeling potatoes outside the farmhouse door. She was a
woman of about seventy-two, very thin, shriveled and wrinkled, almost
dried up in fact and much bent but as active and untiring as a girl.
Chicot patted her on the back in a friendly fashion and then sat down by
her on a stool.

"Well mother, you are always pretty well and hearty, I am glad to see."

"Nothing to complain of, considering, thank you. And how are you,
Monsieur Chicot?"

"Oh, pretty well, thank you, except a few rheumatic pains occasionally;
otherwise I have nothing to complain of."

"So much the better."

And she said no more, while Chicot watched her going on with her work.
Her crooked, knotted fingers, hard as a lobster's claws, seized the
tubers, which were lying in a pail, as if they had been a pair of
pincers, and she peeled them rapidly, cutting off long strips of
skin with an old knife which she held in the other hand, throwing the
potatoes into the water as they were done. Three daring fowls jumped one
after the other into her lap, seized a bit of peel and then ran away as
fast as their legs would carry them with it in their beak.

Chicot seemed embarrassed, anxious, with something on the tip of his
tongue which he could not say. At last he said hurriedly:

"Listen, Mother Magloir