amasa)_ your excellency!"

* * * * *

Not a few of the _Bizarrures_ of the Sieur Gaulard are the
prototypes of bulls and foolish sayings of the typical Irishman, which
go their ceaseless round in popular periodicals, and are even
audaciously reproduced as original in our "comic" journals--save the
mark! To cite some examples:

A friend one day told M. Gaulard that the Dean of Besancon was dead.
"Believe it not," said he; "for had it been so he would have told me
himself, since he writes to me about everything."

M. Gaulard asked his secretary one evening what hour it was. "Sir,"
replied the secretary, "I cannot tell you by the dial, because the sun
is set." "Well," quoth M. Gaulard, "and can you not see by the candle?"

On another occasion the Sieur called from his bed to a servant desiring
him to see if it was daylight yet. "There is no sign of daylight," said
the servant. "I do not wonder," rejoined the Sieur, "that thou canst not
see day, great fool as thou art. Take a candle and look with it out at
the window, and thou shalt see whether it be day or not."

In a strange house, the Sieur found the walls of his bedchamber full of
great holes. "This," exclaimed he in a rage, "is the cursedest chamber
in all the world. One may see day all the night through."

Travelling in the country, his man, to gain the fairest way, rode
through a field sowed with pease, upon which M. Gaulard cried to him,
"Thou knave, wilt thou burn my horse's feet? Dost thou not know that
about six weeks ago I burned my mouth with eating pease, they were so
hot?"

A poor man complained to him that he had had a horse stolen from him.
"Why did you not mark his visage," asked M. Gaulard, "and the clothes he
wore?" "Sir," said the man, "I was not there when he was stolen." Quoth
the Sieur, "You should have left somebody to ask him his name, and in
what place he resided."

M. Gaulard felt the sun so hot in the midst of a field at noontide in
August that he asked of those about him, "What means the sun to be so
hot? How should it not keep its heat till winter, when it is cold
weather?"

A proctor, discoursing with M. Gaulard, told him that a dumb, deaf, or
blind man could not make a will but with certain additional forms. "I
pray you," said the Sieur, "give me that in writing, that I may send it
to a cousin of mine who is lame."

One day a friend visited the Sieur and found him asleep in his chair. "I
slept," s