sternly, "Go away!" There were days when he had lucid intervals and
could give his wife excellent advice as to the sale of their wines;
but at such times he became extremely annoying, and would ransack her
closets and steal her delicacies, which he devoured in secret.
Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their appearance he would
treat them with civility; but as a general thing his remarks and
replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked him, "How do
you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?" "I have grown a beard," he
replied, "have you?" "Are you better?" asked another. "Jerusalem!
Jerusalem!" was the answer. But the greater part of the time he gazed
stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his wife
would say, "The good-man does not hear anything to-day."

On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy;
he flourished his knives and shouted, "That joke dishonors me!"

As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men
in sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the
same respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture.
Among his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet
discovered the object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the
community had learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries.
He insisted on keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in
the cellar of his house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on
them. But then the month of June came round he grew uneasy with the
restless anxiety of a madman about the sale of the sack and the
puncheons. Madame Margaritis could nearly always persuade him that the
wine had been sold at an enormous price, which she paid over to him,
and which he hid so cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant