“Oh, thank you,” murmured the child, with a delighted expression.  However, she remained thoughtful, evidently struggling with some great difficulty to which she could find no explanation.  At last she spoke.

“But what had the poor man done,” she asked, “that he was sent away and put in the ship?”

Lisa and Augustine smiled.  They were quite charmed with the child’s intelligence; and Lisa, without giving the little one a direct reply, took advantage of the opportunity to teach her a lesson by telling her that naughty children were also sent away in boats like that.

“Oh, then,” remarked Pauline judiciously, “perhaps it served my cousin’s poor man quite right if he cried all night long.”

Lisa resumed her sewing, bending over her work.  Quenu had not listened.  He had been cutting some little rounds of onion over a pot placed on the fire; and almost at once the onions began to crackle, raising a clear shrill chirrup like that of grasshoppers basking in the heat.  They gave out a pleasant odour too, and when Quenu plunged his great wooden spoon into the pot the chirruping became yet louder, and the whole kitchen was filled with the penetrating perfume of the onions.  Auguste meantime was preparing some bacon fat in a dish, and Leon’s chopper fell faster and faster, and every now and then scraped the block so as to gather together the sausage-meat, now almost a paste.

“When they got across the sea,” Florent continued, “they took the man to an island called the Devil’s Island,[*] where he found himself amongst others who had been carried away from their own country.  They were all very unhappy.  At first they were kept to hard labour, just like convicts.  The gendarme who had charge of them counted them three times every day, so as to be sure that none were missing.  Later on, they were left free to do as they liked, being merely locked up at night in a big wooden hut, where they slept in hammocks stretched between two bars.  At the end of the year they went about barefooted, as their boots were quite worn out, and their clothes had become so ragged that their flesh showed through them.  They had built themselves some huts with trunks of trees as a shelter against the sun, which is terribly hot in those parts; but these huts did not shield them against the mosquitoes, which covered them with pimples and swellings during the night.  Many of them died, and the others turned quite yellow, so shrunken and wretched, with their long, unkempt beards, that one could not behold them without pity.”

[*] The Ile du Diable.  This spot was selected as the place of detention of Captain Dreyfus, the French officer convicted in 1894 of having divulged important military documents to foreign powers.—­Translator.

“Auguste, give me the fat,” cried Quenu; and when the apprentice had handed him the dish he let the pieces of bacon-fat slide gently into the pot, and then stirred them with his spoon.  A yet denser steam now rose from the fireplace.