“Good evening, Master Patience; a good night’s rest to you.”

The sorcerer, roused out of his reverie, started like a man waked from sleep; and I saw, not without a certain emotion, his weather-beaten face half covered with a thick gray beard.  His big head was quite bald, and the bareness of his forehead only served to make his bushy eyebrows more prominent.  Behind these his round deepset eyes seemed to flash like lightning at the end of summer behind the fading foliage.  He was of small stature, but very broad-shouldered; in fact, built like a gladiator.  The rags in which he was clad were defiantly filthy.  His face was short and of a vulgar type, like that of Socrates; and if the fire of genius glowed in his strongly marked features, I certainly could not perceive it.  He appeared to me a wild beast, an unclean animal.  Filled with a sense of loathing, and determined to avenge the insult he had offered to my name, I put a stone in my sling, and without further ado hurled it at him with all my might.

At the moment the stone flew out, Patience was in the act of replying to the boy’s greeting.

“Good evening, lads; God be with you!” he was saying when the stone whistled past his ear and struck a tame owl of which Patience had made a pet, and which at the approach of night was beginning to rouse itself in the ivy above the door.

The owl gave a piercing cry and fell bleeding at the feet of its master, who answered it with a roar of anger.  For a few seconds he stood motionless with surprise and fury.  Then suddenly, taking the palpitating victim by the feet, he lifted it up, and, coming towards us, cried in a voice of thunder: 

“Which of you wretches threw that stone?”

The boy who had been walking behind, flew with the swiftness of the wind; but Sylvain, seized by the great hand of the sorcerer, fell upon his knees, swearing by the Holy Virgin and by Saint Solange, the patroness of Berry, that he was innocent of the death of the bird.  I felt, I confess, a strong inclination to let him get out of the scrape as best he could, and make my escape into the thicket.  I had expected to see a decrepit old juggler, not to fall into the hands of a robust enemy; but pride held me back.

“If you did this,” said Patience to my trembling comrade, “I pity you; for you are a wicked child, and you will grow into a dishonest man.  You have done a bad deed; you have made it your pleasure to cause pain to an old man who never did you any harm; and you have done this treacherously, like a coward, while feigning politeness and bidding him good-evening.  You are a liar, a miscreant; you have robbed me of my only society, my only riches; you have taken delight in evil.  God preserve you from living if you are going on in this way.”

“Oh, Monsieur Patience!” cried the boy, clasping his hands; “do not curse me; do not bewitch me; do not give me any illness; it wasn’t I!  May God strike me dead if it was!”