“How so, my old necromancer?”

“Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to understand the beasts.  Now, see, this is what we’ll do.  When the otter wants to get home Mouche and I’ll frighten it here, and you’ll frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost!  It can’t run; it has web feet for swimming.  Ho, ho! it will make you laugh, such floundering! you don’t know whether you are fishing or hunting!  The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days running, he was so bent on getting an otter.”

Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.

“There, that will do, my good gentleman.”

Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time, for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect stillness of watching.

“Pere Fourchon,” whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old man, “there’s really an otter!”

“Do you see it?”

“There, see there!”

The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the reddish-brown fur of an actual otter.

“It’s coming my way!” said the child.

“Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him fast down, but don’t let him go!”

Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.

“Come, come, my good gentleman,” cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet, jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, “frighten him! frighten him!  Don’t you see him? he is swimming fast your way!”

The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest excitements:—­

“Don’t you see him, there, along the rocks?”

Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to himself.

“Go on, go on!” cried Pere Fourchon; “on the rock side; the burrow is there, to your left!”

Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped from the stones into the water.

“Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman!  Twenty good Gods!  I see him between your legs! you’ll have him!—­ Ah! there! he’s gone—­he’s gone!” cried the old man, in despair.

Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.

“It’s your fault we’ve lost him!” he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton.  “The rascal, I see him, under those rocks!  He has let go his fish,” continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface.  “We’ll have that at any rate; it’s a tench, a real tench.”