had work and a home awaiting him
for every day in the year. As regular in his round as the earth in her
rotation, he would reappear on a given day at the very place where he
had appeared the year before, and always with the same dog and with the
same long sword.

This personage was as curious as the sorcerer Patience; perhaps more
comic in his way than the sorcerer. He was a bilious, melancholy man,
tall, lean, angular, full of languor, dignity, and deliberation in
speech and action. So little did he like talking that he answered all
questions in monosyllables; and yet he never failed to obey the laws of
the most scrupulous politeness, and rarely said a word without raising
his hand to the corner of his hat as a sign of respect and civility.
Was he thus by nature, or, in his itinerant trade, had this wise
reserve arisen from a fear of alienating some of his numerous clients
by incautious chatter? No one knew. In all houses he was allowed a free
hand; during the day he had the key of every granary; in the evening,
a place at the fireside of every kitchen. He knew everything that
happened; for his dreamy, absorbed air led people to talk freely in his
presence; yet he had never been known to inform any household of the
doings of another.

If you wish to know how I had become struck by this strange character,
I may tell you that I had been a witness of my uncle's and grandfather's
efforts to make him talk. They hoped to draw from him some information
about the chateau of Saint-Severe, the home of a man they hated and
envied, M. Hubert de Mauprat. Although Don Marcasse (they called him Don
because he seemed to have the bearing and pride of a ruined hidalgo),
although Don Marcasse, I say, had shown himself as incompressible here
as elsewhere, the Coupe-Jarret Mauprats never failed to squeeze him a
little more in the hope of extracting some details about the Casse-Tete
Mauprats.

Nobody, then, could discover Marcasse's opinions about anything; it
would have been simplest to suppose that he did not take the trouble
to have any. Yet the attraction which Patience seemed to feel towards
him--so great that he would accompany him on his travels for several
weeks altogether--led one to believe that there was some witchery in the
man's mysterious air, and that it was not solely the length of his sword
and the skill of his dog which played such wonderful havoc with the
moles and weasels. There were whispered rumours of the enchanted