apt to feel that there was a mistake somewhere in the ordering of human
affairs, and that this man was one of its victims.

In a few minutes two men passed hastily through the shop into the little
room, with scarcely so much as a nod for Mr. Jacquetot.




CHAPTER II


TOOLS


The first man to enter the room was clad in a blouse of coarse grey
cloth which reached down to his knees. On his head he wore a black silk
cap, very much pressed down and exceedingly greasy on the right side.
This was to be accounted for by the fact that he used his right shoulder
more than the left in that state of life in which he had been placed. It
was not what we, who do not kill, would consider a pleasant state. He
was, in fact, a slayer of beasts--a foreman at the slaughter-house.

It is, perhaps, fortunate that Antoine Lerac is of no great prominence
in this record, and of none in his official capacity at the
slaughter-house. But the man is worthy of some small attention, because
he was so essentially of the nineteenth century--so distinctly a product
of the latter end of what is, for us at least, the most important cycle
of years the world has passed through. He was a man wearing the blouse
with ostentation, and glorying in the greasy cap: professing his