A little green frog leaped from under his feet.  He endeavored to catch it.  It escaped him.  He followed it and lost it three times in succession.  At last he caught it by one of its hind legs and began to laugh as he saw the efforts the creature made to escape.  It gathered itself up on its hind legs and then with a violent spring suddenly stretched them out as stiff as two bars; while it beat the air with its front legs as though they were hands, its round eyes staring in their circle of yellow.  It reminded him of a toy made of straight slips of wood nailed zigzag one on the other; which by a similar movement regulated the movements of the little soldiers fastened thereon.  Then he thought of his home, and then of his mother, and, overcome by sorrow, he again began to weep.  A shiver passed over him.  He knelt down and said his prayers as before going to bed.  But he was unable to finish them, for tumultuous, violent sobs shook his whole frame.  He no longer thought, he no longer saw anything around him, and was wholly absorbed in crying.

Suddenly a heavy hand was placed upon his shoulder, and a rough voice asked him: 

“What is it that causes you so much grief, my little man?”

Simon turned round.  A tall workman with a beard and black curly hair was staring at him good-naturedly.  He answered with his eyes and throat full of tears: 

“They beat me—­because—­I—­I have no—­papa—­no papa.”

“What!” said the man, smiling; “why, everybody has one.”

The child answered painfully amid his spasms of grief: 

“But I—­I—­I have none.”

Then the workman became serious.  He had recognized La Blanchotte’s son, and, although himself a new arrival in the neighborhood, he had a vague idea of her history.

“Well,” said he, “console yourself, my boy, and come with me home to your mother.  They will give you—­a papa.”

And so they started on the way, the big fellow holding the little fellow by the hand, and the man smiled, for he was not sorry to see this Blanchotte, who was, it was said, one of the prettiest girls of the countryside, and, perhaps, he was saying to himself, at the bottom of his heart, that a lass who had erred might very well err again.

They arrived in front of a very neat little white house.

“There it is,” exclaimed the child, and he cried, “Mamma!”

A woman appeared, and the workman instantly left off smiling, for he saw at once that there was no fooling to be done with the tall pale girl who stood austerely at her door as though to defend from one man the threshold of that house where she had already been betrayed by another.  Intimidated, his cap in his hand, he stammered out: 

“See, madame, I have brought you back your little boy who had lost himself near the river.”

But Simon flung his arms about his mother’s neck and told her, as he again began to cry: 

“No, mamma, I wished to drown myself, because the others had beaten me —­had beaten me—­because I have no papa.”