e longer, and when she had finished her glass, draining the last
drops so as to make the pleasure last all the longer, she said:

"Yes, that is first-rate!"

Almost before she had said it, Chicot had poured her out another
glassful. She wished to refuse, but it was too late, and she drank it
very slowly, like she had done the first, and he asked her to have a
third. She objected, but he persisted.

"It is as mild as milk, you know; I can drink ten or a dozen without any
ill effects; it goes down like sugar, and leaves no signs in the head,
one would think that it evaporated on the tongue. It is the most
wholesome thing you can drink."

She took it, for she really wished to have it, but she left half the
glass.

Then Chicot, in an excess of generosity, said:

"Look here, as it is so much to your taste, I will give you a small keg
of it, just to show that you and I are still excellent friends." So she
took one away with her, feeling slightly overcome by the effects of what
she had drunk.

The next day the innkeeper drove into her yard, and took a little
iron-hooped keg out of his gig. He insisted on her tasting the contents,
to make sure it was the same delicious article, and, when they had each
of them drunk three more glasses, he said, as he was going away:

"Well, you know, when it is all gone, there is more left; don't be
modest, for I shall not mind. The sooner it is finished, the better
pleased I shall be."

Four days later he came again. The old woman was outside her door
cutting up the bread for her soup.

He went up to her, and put his face close to hers, so that he might
smell her breath; and when he smelt the alcohol he felt pleased.

"I suppose you will give me a glass of _the special_?" he said. And they
had three glasses each.

Soon, however, it began to be whispered abroad that Mother Magloire was
in the habit of getting drunk all by herself. She was picked up in her
kitchen, then in her yard, then in the roads in the neighborhood, and
she was often brought home like a log.

Chicot did not go near her any more, and, when people spoke to him about
her, he used to say, putting on a distressed look:

"It is a great pity that she should have taken to drink at her age; but
when people get old there is no remedy. It will be the death of her in
the long run."

And it certainly was the death of her. She died the next winter. About
Christmas-time she fell down, unconscious, in the snow, and was fo