a-pigs they have killed?--not one. So, then, the rabbit dies,
and justice takes no notice. This rabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has
its entrails taken out by his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this
dunghill is a hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn taken
ill, and dies next day. At the moment when she is struggling in the
convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by (there are a good many
vultures in Adelmonte's country); this bird darts on the dead fowl,
and carries it away to a rock, where it dines off its prey. Three days
afterwards, this poor vulture, which has been very much indisposed since
that dinner, suddenly feels very giddy while flying aloft in the
clouds, and falls heavily into a fish-pond. The pike, eels, and carp eat
greedily always, as everybody knows--well, they feast on the vulture.
Now suppose that next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned
at the fourth remove, is served up at your table. Well, then, your guest
will be poisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eight
or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or abscess of the
pylorus. The doctors open the body and say with an air of profound
learning, 'The subject has died of a tumor on the liver, or of typhoid
fever!'"

"But," remarked Madame de Villefort, "all these circumstances which
you link thus to one another may be broken by the least accident; the
vulture may not see the fowl, or may fall a hundred yards from the
fish-pond."

"Ah, that is where the art comes in. To be a great chemist in the
East, one must direct chance; and this is to be achieved."--Madame de
Villefort was in deep thought, yet listened attentively. "But,"
she exclaimed, suddenly, "arsenic is indelible, indestructible; in
whatsoever way it is absorbed, it will be found again in the body of the
victim from the moment when it has been taken in sufficient quantity to
cause death."

"Precisely so," cried Monte Cristo--"precisely so; and this is what I
said to my worthy Adelmonte. He reflected, smiled, and replied to me by
a Sicilian proverb, which I believe is also a French proverb, 'My son,
the world was not made in a day--but in seven. Return on Sunday.' On
the Sunday following I did return to him. Instead of having watered his
cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it this time with a solution of
salts, having their basis in strychnine, strychnos colubrina, as the
learned term it. Now, the cabbage had not the slightest appeara