No one spoke, so great was the tension. It was
a warm April day. Outside the window the yellow
hen could be heard calling to her newly-fledged brood.
Toine, who was perspiring with emotion and anxiety,
murmured:
“I have another now—under the left
arm.”
His’ wife plunged her great bony hand into the
bed, and pulled out a second chicken with all the
care of a midwife.
The neighbors wanted to see it. It was passed
from one to another, and examined as if it were a
phenomenon.
For twenty minutes no more hatched out, then four
emerged at the same moment from their shells.
There was a great commotion among the lookers-on.
And Toine smiled with satisfaction, beginning to take
pride in this unusual sort of paternity. There
were not many like him! Truly, he was a remarkable
specimen of humanity!
“That makes six!” he declared. “Great
heavens, what a christening we’ll have!”
And a loud laugh rose from all present. Newcomers
filled the bar. They asked one another:
“How many are there?”
“Six.”
Toine’s wife took this new family to the hen,
who clucked loudly, bristled her feathers, and spread
her wings wide to shelter her growing brood of little
ones.
“There’s one more!” cried Toine.
He was mistaken. There were three! It was
an unalloyed triumph! The last chicken broke
through its shell at seven o’clock in the evening.
All the eggs were good! And Toine, beside himself
with joy, his brood hatched out, exultant, kissed
the tiny creature on the back, almost suffocating
it. He wanted to keep it in his bed until morning,
moved by a mother’s tenderness toward the tiny
being which he had brought to life, but the old woman
carried it away like the others, turning a deaf ear
to her husband’s entreaties.
The delighted spectators went off to spread the news
of the event, and Horslaville, who was the last to
go, asked:
“You’ll invite me when the first is cooked,
won’t you, Toine?”
At this idea a smile overspread the fat man’s
face, and he answered:
“Certainly I’ll invite you, my son-in-law.”
We had just left Gisors, where I was awakened to hearing
the name of the town called out by the guards, and
I was dozing off again when a terrific shock threw
me forward on top of a large lady who sat opposite
me.
One of the wheels of the engine had broken, and the
engine itself lay across the track. The tender
and the baggage car were also derailed, and lay beside
this mutilated engine, which rattled, groaned, hissed,
puffed, sputtered, and resembled those horses that
fall in the street with their flanks heaving, their
breast palpitating, their nostrils steaming and their
whole body trembling, but incapable of the slightest
effort to rise and start off again.
