He ran past us, brandishing a landing-net as a warrior his lance; he might have been a youth of twenty-five.  We followed, less keen and also less confident than he.  He was right, though; when he drew up his line, the float of which was disappearing in jerks, carrying the bell along with it beneath the water, he brought out a fair-sized jack, which he declared to be a giant.

He let it run for some time, to tire it, and to prolong the pleasure of playing it.

“Gentlemen,” he cried, “it is cutting my finger off!”

A stroke from the landing-net laid the monster at our feet, its strength all spent.  It weighed rather under four pounds.  Jupille swore to six.

My learned tutor and I sat down again side by side, but the thread of our conversation had been broken past mending.  I tried to talk of her, but M. Flamaran insisted on talking of me, of Bourges, of his election as professor, and of the radically distinct characteristics by which you can tell the bite of a gudgeon from that of a stickleback.

The latter part of this lecture was, however, purely theoretical, for he got up two hours before sunset without having hooked a fish.

“A good day, all the same,” he said.  “It’s a good place, and the fish were biting this morning.  We’ll come here again some day, Jupille; with an east wind you ought to catch any quantity of gudgeons.”  He kept pace beside me on our way home, but wearied, no doubt, with long sitting, with the heat, and the glare from the water, fell into a reverie, from which the incidents of the walk were unable to rouse him.

Jupille trotted before us, carrying his rod in one hand, a luncheon-basket and a fish-bag in the other.  He turned round and gave us a look at each cross-road, smiled beneath his heavy moustache, and went on faster than before.  I felt sure that something out of the way was about to happen, and that the silent quill-driver was tasting a quiet joke.

I had not guessed the whole truth.

At a turn of the road M. Flamaran suddenly pulled up, looked all around him, and drew a deep breath.

“Hallo, Jupille!  My good sir, where are you taking us?  If I can believe my eyes, this is the Chestnut Knoll, down yonder is Plessis Piquet, and we are two miles from the station and the seven o’clock train!”

There was no denying it.  A donkey emerged from the wood, hung with tassels and bells, carrying in its panniers two little girls, whose parents toiled behind, goad in hand.  The woods had become shrubberies, through which peeped the thatched roofs of rustic summerhouses, mazes, artificial waterfalls, grottoes, and ruins; all the dread handiwork of the rustic decorator burst, superabundant, upon our sight, with shy odors of beer and cooking.  Broken bottles strewed the paths; the bushes all looked weary, harassed, and overworked; a confused murmur of voices and crackers floated toward us upon the breeze.  I knew full well from these