a sudden light at the sight of the stick which Lambernier held.

"You scoundrel!" he exclaimed, "you probably regard my trees also as
your own. Where did you cut that stick?"

"Go and find out," said the workman, accompanying his reply with a
flourish of the stick.

The Baron coolly dismounted, threw the bridle over his horse's neck,
walked up to the workman, who had taken the position of a practised
pugilist to receive him, and, without giving him time to strike, he
disarmed him with one hand by a blow which would have been sufficient to
uproot the beech rod before it was metamorphosed into a club; with the
other hand he seized the man by the collar and gave him a shaking that it
was as impossible to struggle against as if it had been caused by a
steam-engine. Obeying this irresistible force, in spite of his kicking,
Lambernier described a dozen circles around his adversary, while the
latter set these off with some of the hardest blows from green wood that
ever chastised an insolent fellow. This gymnastic exercise ended by a
sleight-of-hand trick, which, after making the carpenter pirouette for
the last time, sent him rolling head-first into a ditch, the bottom of
which, fortunately for him, was provided with a bed of soft mud. When
the punishment was over, Bergenheim remounted his horse as tranquilly as
he had dismounted it, and continued his way toward the chateau.

The young man, in the midst of the thicket where he was concealed, had
lost no detail of this rural scene. He could not help having a feeling
of admiration for this energetic representative of the feudal ages who,
with no fear of any court of justice or other bourgeois inventions, had
thus exerted over his own domains the summary justice in force in Eastern