recognition of certain services, a situation as practitioner, which in
remote country-places usually devolves on those who are able to sign
their name. Pere Fourchon therefore added to his other avocations that
of witness, or practitioner of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet
came to draw them in the districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy.
Vermichel and Fourchon, allied by a friendship of twenty years'
tippling, might really be considered a business firm.

Mouche and Fourchon, bound together by vice as Mentor and Telemachus
by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father,
"panis angelorum,"--the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory
had retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the
Grand-I-Vert, and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in
their busiest and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to
make as much as three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first
place, no dealer within a radius of fifty miles would have trusted his
tow to either Mouche or Fourchon. The old man, surpassing the miracles
of modern chemistry, knew too well how to resolve the tow into the
all-benignant juice of the grape. Moreover, his triple functions of
public writer for three townships, legal practitioner for one, and
clarionet-player at large, hindered, so he said, the development of his
business.

Thus it happened that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the
hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of
property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very
common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse
because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being
tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air. Tonsard
blamed his wife for her father's short-comings, and ill-treated her,