's rest to you."

The sorcerer, roused out of his reverie, started like a man waked from
sleep; and I saw, not without a certain emotion, his weather-beaten face
half covered with a thick gray beard. His big head was quite bald, and
the bareness of his forehead only served to make his bushy eyebrows
more prominent. Behind these his round deepset eyes seemed to flash
like lightning at the end of summer behind the fading foliage. He was
of small stature, but very broad-shouldered; in fact, built like a
gladiator. The rags in which he was clad were defiantly filthy. His face
was short and of a vulgar type, like that of Socrates; and if the fire
of genius glowed in his strongly marked features, I certainly could not
perceive it. He appeared to me a wild beast, an unclean animal. Filled
with a sense of loathing, and determined to avenge the insult he had
offered to my name, I put a stone in my sling, and without further ado
hurled it at him with all my might.

At the moment the stone flew out, Patience was in the act of replying to
the boy's greeting.

"Good evening, lads; God be with you!" he was saying when the stone
whistled past his ear and struck a tame owl of which Patience had made a
pet, and which at the approach of night was beginning to rouse itself in
the ivy above the door.

The owl gave a piercing cry and fell bleeding at the feet of its
master, who answered it with a roar of anger. For a few seconds he stood
motionless with surprise and fury. Then suddenly, taking the palpitating
victim by the feet, he lifted it up, and, coming towards us, cried in a
voice of thunder:

"Which of you wretches threw that stone?"

The boy who had been walking behind, flew with the swiftness of the
wind; but Sylvain, seized by the great hand of the sorcerer, fell
upon his knees, swearing by the Holy Virgin and by Saint Solange, the
patroness of Berry, that he was innocent of the death of the bird. I
felt, I confess, a strong inclination to let him get out of the scrape
as best he could, and make my escape into the thicket. I had expected
to see a decrepit old juggler, not to fall into the hands of a robust
enemy; but pride held me back.

"If you did this," said Patience to my trembling comrade, "I pity you;
for you are a wicked child, and you will grow into a dishonest man. You
have done a bad deed; you have made it your pleasure to cause pain to
an old man who never did you any harm; and you have done this
treacherously,