satisfaction."

Unable to speak at his ease, my good teacher was suffocating.
Suddenly, breaking out very loud, he said to the philosopher:

"Sir, I am fifty-one years old, a master of arts and a doctor of
divinity. I have read all the Greek and Latin authors, who have not
been annihilated either by time's injury or by man's malice, and I
have never seen a Salamander, wherefrom I conclude that no such
thing exists."

"Excuse me," said Friar Ange, half suffocated by partridge pie and
half by dismay; "excuse me! Unhappily some Salamanders do exist and
a learned Jesuit father, whose name I have forgotten, has discoursed
on their apparition. I myself have seen, at a place called St
Claude, at a cottager's, a Salamander in a fireplace close to a
kettle. She had a cat's head, a toad's body and the tail of a fish.
I threw a handful of holy water on the beast, and it at once
disappeared in the air, with a frightful noise like sudden frying
and I was enveloped in acrid fumes, which very nearly burnt my eyes
out. And what I say is so true that for at least a whole week my
beard smelt of burning, which proves better than anything else the
maliciousness of the beast."

"You want to make game of us, little friar," said the abbe. "Your
toad with a cat's head is no more real than the Nymph of that
gentleman, and it is quite a disgusting invention."

The philosopher began to laugh, and said Friar Ange had not seen the
wise man's Salamander. When the Nymphs of the fire meet with a