No one spoke, so great was the tension.  It was a warm April day.  Outside the window the yellow hen could be heard calling to her newly-fledged brood.

Toine, who was perspiring with emotion and anxiety, murmured: 

“I have another now—­under the left arm.”

His’ wife plunged her great bony hand into the bed, and pulled out a second chicken with all the care of a midwife.

The neighbors wanted to see it.  It was passed from one to another, and examined as if it were a phenomenon.

For twenty minutes no more hatched out, then four emerged at the same moment from their shells.

There was a great commotion among the lookers-on.  And Toine smiled with satisfaction, beginning to take pride in this unusual sort of paternity.  There were not many like him!  Truly, he was a remarkable specimen of humanity!

“That makes six!” he declared.  “Great heavens, what a christening we’ll have!”

And a loud laugh rose from all present.  Newcomers filled the bar.  They asked one another: 

“How many are there?”

“Six.”

Toine’s wife took this new family to the hen, who clucked loudly, bristled her feathers, and spread her wings wide to shelter her growing brood of little ones.

“There’s one more!” cried Toine.

He was mistaken.  There were three!  It was an unalloyed triumph!  The last chicken broke through its shell at seven o’clock in the evening.  All the eggs were good!  And Toine, beside himself with joy, his brood hatched out, exultant, kissed the tiny creature on the back, almost suffocating it.  He wanted to keep it in his bed until morning, moved by a mother’s tenderness toward the tiny being which he had brought to life, but the old woman carried it away like the others, turning a deaf ear to her husband’s entreaties.

The delighted spectators went off to spread the news of the event, and Horslaville, who was the last to go, asked: 

“You’ll invite me when the first is cooked, won’t you, Toine?”

At this idea a smile overspread the fat man’s face, and he answered: 

“Certainly I’ll invite you, my son-in-law.”

MADAME HUSSON’S “ROSIER”

We had just left Gisors, where I was awakened to hearing the name of the town called out by the guards, and I was dozing off again when a terrific shock threw me forward on top of a large lady who sat opposite me.

One of the wheels of the engine had broken, and the engine itself lay across the track.  The tender and the baggage car were also derailed, and lay beside this mutilated engine, which rattled, groaned, hissed, puffed, sputtered, and resembled those horses that fall in the street with their flanks heaving, their breast palpitating, their nostrils steaming and their whole body trembling, but incapable of the slightest effort to rise and start off again.