Then he got up, lit the candle, and began to walk up and down, with his arms behind him.  She was cowering on the bed and crying, and suddenly he stopped in front of her, and said:  “Then it is my fault that you have no children?” She gave him no answer, and he began to walk up and down again, and then, stopping again, he continued:  “How old is your child?” “Just six,” she whispered.  “Why did you not tell me about it?” he asked.  “How could I?” she replied, with a sigh.

He remained standing, motionless.  “Come, get up,” he said.  She got up, with some difficulty, and then, when she was standing on the floor, he suddenly began to laugh, with his hearty laugh of his good days, and seeing how surprised she was, he added:  “Very well, we will go and fetch the child, as you and I can have none together.”

She was so scared that, if she had the strength, she would assuredly have run away, but the farmer rubbed his hands and said:  “I wanted to adopt one, and now we have found one.  I asked the Cure about an orphan, some time ago.”

Then, still laughing, he kissed his weeping and agitated wife on both cheeks, and shouted out, as if she could not hear him:  “Come along, mother, we will go and see whether there is any soup left; I should not mind a plateful.”

She put on her petticoat, and they went down stairs; and while she was kneeling in front of the fire-place, and lighting the fire under the saucepan, he continued to walk up and down the kitchen in long strides, and said: 

“Well, I am really glad at this:  I am not saying it for form’s sake, but I am glad, I am really very glad.”

MAMMA STIRLING

Tall, slim, looking almost naked under her transparent dress of gauze, which fell in straight folds as far as the gold bracelets on her slender wrists, with languor in her rich voice, and something undulating and feline in the rhythmical swing of her wrist and hips.  Tatia Caroly was singing one of those sweet Creole songs which call up some far distant fairy-like country, and unknown caresses, for which the lips remain always thirsting.

Footit, the clown, was leaning against the piano with a blackened face, and with his mouth that looked like a red gash from a saber cut, and his wide open eyes, he expressed feelings of the most extravagant emotion, while some niggers squatted on the ground, and accompanied the orchestra by strumming on some yellow, empty gourds.

But what made the woman and the children in the pantomime of the “New Circus” laugh most, was the incessant quarrel between an enormous Danish hound and a poor old supernumerary, who was blackened like a negro minstrel, and dressed like a Mulatto woman.  The dog was always annoying him, followed him, snapped at his legs, and at his old wig, with his sharp teeth, and tore his coat and his silk pocket-handkerchief, whenever he could get hold of it, to pieces.  And the man used positively to allow himself to be molested and bitten, played his part with dull resignation, with mechanical unconsciousness of a man who has come down in the world, and who gains his livelihood as best he can, and who has already endured worse things than that.