have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls. From
teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a
refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded.
Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept
them in his pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in
another village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was
soon dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his
rope-walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital. The
workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-loft,
and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law in
the matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make
the first rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere
Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his
natural daughters, came from the otters; and then there were
breakfasts and dinners given them by peasants who could neither read
nor write, and were glad to use the old fellow's talents when they had
a bill to make out, or a letter to dispatch. Besides all this, he knew
how to play the clarionet, and he went about with his friend
Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to village weddings and the grand
balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.

Vermichel's name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so
generally used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of
Soulanges, was in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called
Vermichel, practitioner. Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian
regiment of former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in