was more given to the bottle than the trencher.  His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles.  The eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a pig, betrayed cunning and also laziness; but at this particular moment they were gleaming with the intent look he cast upon the river.  The sole garments of this curious figure were an old blouse, formerly blue, and trousers of the coarse burlap used in Paris to wrap bales.  All city people would have shuddered at the sight of his broken sabots, without even a wisp of straw to stop the cracks; and it is very certain that the blouse and the trousers had no money value at all except to a paper-maker.

As Blondet examined this rural Diogenes, he admitted the possibility of a type of peasantry he had seen in old tapestries, old pictures, old sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him imaginary.  He resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the school of ugliness, perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be but the flattering exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to believe.

“What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being?  What is he thinking of?” thought Blondet, seized with curiosity.  “Is he my fellow-creature?  We have nothing in common but shape, and even that!—­”

He noticed in the old man’s limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies of the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,—­hardened to everything, in short,—­which makes their leathern skin almost a hide, and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful as that of the Russians or the Arabs.

“Here’s one of Cooper’s Red-skins,” thought Blondet; “one needn’t go to America to study savages.”

Though the Parisian was less than ten paces off, the old man did not turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their stiffened joints.  Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism, more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing at the water himself.

“Well, my good man, what do you see there?” he asked, after the lapse of a quarter of an hour, during which time he saw nothing to justify this intent contemplation.

“Hush!” whispered the old man, with a sign to Blondet not to ruffle the air with his voice; “You will frighten it—­”

“What?”

“An otter, my good gentleman.  If it hears us it’ll go quick under water.  I’m certain it jumped there; see! see! there, where the water bubbles!  Ha! it sees a fish, it is after that!  But my boy will grab it as it comes back.  The otter, don’t you know, is very rare; it is scientific game, and good eating, too.  I get ten francs for every one I carry to Les Aigues, for the lady fasts Fridays, and to-morrow is Friday.  Years agone the deceased madame used to pay me twenty francs, and gave me the skin to boot!  Mouche,” he called, in a low voice, “watch it!”