The Surprises of Life

ersonage, who comes and fills the countryside with special guards to keep the aggrieved pedestrian out of glades and plains and bypaths, seems to the rustics a pernicious intruder, in a state

"maker of trouble." The only

having the law on their side, always end by getting the better of those whose

means jail, penitentiary, scaffold. All for a miserable rabbit! Remnants of the feudali

he poacher, you will not succeed in discouraging him. Has anything ever cured a devotee of roulette? And to the excitement of gambling, in this case, is added the attraction of danger. There is no cure for it. The question of increasing the penalty for poaching of

a hunter without a permit, and as no such thing exists as a peasant whom a hare has never tempted to use his gun, and as a natural understanding unites all those who are compelled to pay t

is by no means eager to meet him, and with the occasional gendarmes, whose cocked hats and baldricks make them conspicuous from afar. Following a

15 who, having been a poacher all his days, and a marauder now and then, died without ever having had a writ served on him. The entire district took pride in Janière. When he left us for a better world: "He never once went to prison," said the peasants by way of funeral oration. What that man could deduce from a blade of grass lying over on one side or the other at the edge of a t

s, he seems to belong to a different world, and the police officer at war against illicit fishing, backed up by more or less convincing arguments relating to the restocking of rivers, has no one on his side. For this reason, my compatriot Simon Grelu counted as many friends as there were inhabitants in the canton. Th

ing under overarching alders, onward to the meadows, where it attracts the flocks. Everywhere are mills with their gates. It is a populous river, and no one could be said to "popu

brated for the constancy of his relations with the police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every angle of every rock, every stump by the water

ukes his men for their lazin

and look

d him without th

enly stood before us. More elongated than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable

e maire," said he with a sort of clucking w

certif

of mendicancy, as usu

? Is there n

stealing, isn't it,

between poaching and stealing

drudges more than I do? The whole night in the wa

caught

e maire. No, it can't be called anything else. I sh

happ

nd down the river. They were half a mile away, and I could still hear

e point, what di

was quietly fishing below the mill of La Rochette. The idea, anyway, of forbidd

hat hap

in my

e a boat

u'll know it to-morrow, anyway, that it was your boat,

did you g

up again without damaging the lock. I should not like to give you an

ght a great

perhaps. I had

much fish in my lif

come ashore! We are serving your warrant on you!' Well, I landed, of course. I am used to it. We chatted like friends. Th

trick they pl

. When, suddenly, I hear voices. The police again! Two warrants in one night! I couldn't have that! The boat was giving me away. But they might think I had left it there. So I hide in the water, with nothing out but my head, a

pe.' I come out, all covered with mud, and I shake my fist at him. 'If you serve another warrant on me--!' says I to him. 'A second warrant?' says he. 'No danger of that. The law prevents it. We can only serve one warrant in twenty-four hours on the same person for the same offence. What! You didn't know that,

N

re. And now, may I have my certificate of mendic

ight have given you pne

harm will ever com

e, to be giving you a certificate of destitu

e maire. I pay them in fish. It