't it?"

"Ha! ha! ha! 'Too bad,' says he, the gentle dear! And the little old man
in the Rue du Roule; and the cattle-dealer and the woman in Saint
Martin's Canal; and the gentleman in the Allee des Veuves; they found
you nice and amiable, I don't think--didn't they--with your
'larding-pin?' Why, then, in your turn, shouldn't you be left to such
tender mercy as you have showed?"

"I'm in your power, don't abuse it," said the Schoolmaster. "Come, come,
I confess I was wrong to suspect you. I was wrong to try and thump
Tortillard; and, you see, I beg pardon; and of you too, Tortillard. Yes,
I ask pardon of both."

"I will have you ask pardon on your knees for having tried to beat the
Chouette," said Tortillard.

"You rum little beggar, how funny you are!" said the Chouette, laughing
loudly; "but I should like to see what a 'guy' you will make of
yourself. So on your knees, as if you were 'pattering' love to your old
darling. Come, do it directly, or we will leave you; and I tell you that
in half an hour it will be quite dark, though you don't look as if you
thought so, old 'No-Eyes.'"

"Night or day, what's that to him?" said Tortillard, saucily. "The
gentleman always has his shutters closed."

"Then here, on my knees, I humbly ask your pardon, Chouette; and yours
also, Tortillard! Will not that content you?" said the robber, kneeling
in the middle of the highway. "And now will you leave me?"

This strange group, enclosed by the embankment of the ravine, and
lighted by the red glimmer of the twilight, was hideous to behold. In
the middle of the road the Schoolmaster, on his knees, extended his
large and coarse hands towards the one-eyed hag; his thick and matted
hair, which his fright had dishevelled, left exposed his motionless,
rigid, glassy, dead eyeballs--the very glance of a corpse. Stooping
deprecatingly his broad-spread shoulders, this Hercules kneels abjectly,
and trembles at the feet of an old woman and a child!

The old hag herself, wrapped in a red-checked shawl, her head covered
with an old cap of black lace, which allowed some locks of her grizzled
hair to escape, looked down with an air of haughty contempt and
domineering pride on the Schoolmaster. The bony, scorched, shrivelled,
and livid countenance of the parrot-nosed old harridan expressed a
savage and insulting joy; her small but fierce eye glistened like a
burning coal; a sinister expression curled her lips, shaded with long
straight hairs, a