Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up all hope.  The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead leaves.  This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of tarred oakum in guise of braces.  A shirt of the same burlap which made the old man’s trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in front showed a sun-burnt little breast.  In short, the attire of the being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere Fourchon.

“What a good-natured set of people they are here,” thought Blondet; “if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of Paris, how their tongues would maul him!”

As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with this episode of his early walk.  “Come,” said he, quite touched when the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, “you say you are a famous otter catcher.  If you are sure there is an otter down there—­”

From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on its surface.

“It has come back!” said Pere Fourchon; “don’t you see it breathe, the beggar?  How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the water?  Ah, the creature’s so clever it laughs at science.”

“Well,” said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, “wait and catch the otter.”

“And what are we to do about our day’s work, Mouche and I?”

“What is your day worth?”

“For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?—­Five francs,” said the old man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an enormous overcharge.

The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, “There’s ten, and I’ll give you ten more for the otter.”

“And it won’t cost you dear if there’s white on its back; for the sub-prefect told me there wasn’t one o’ them museums that had the like; but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,—­no fool he!  If I hunt the otter, he, M’sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has a fine white ‘dot’ on her back.  Come now, my good gentleman, if I may make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that stone down there.  If we head the otter off, it will come down stream; for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily drift down, the sly things!  Ha! if I’d been trained in their school I should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to bag the game before others.  Well, somebody threw a spell over me when I was born.  However, we three together ought to be slyer than the otter.”