Since this famous discussion, which had come near ending in blows, the two old friends had passed their time in lawsuits and tricks. They hated each other savagely. "As for me," declared the captain, "when I find any stones in my garden, I throw them over the hedge into Lanlaire's. So much the worse if they fall on his bell-glasses and on his garden-frames! Or, rather, so much the better! Oh! the pig! Wait now, let me show you." Having noticed a stone in the path, he rushed to pick it up, approached the hedge cautiously, creeping like a trapper, and threw the stone into our garden with all his might. We heard a noise of breaking glass. Then, returning to us triumphantly, shaking, stifled, twisted with laughter, he exclaimed: "Another square broken! The glazier will have to come again." Rose looked at him with a sort of maternal admiration, and said: "Is he not droll? What a child! And how young, for his age!" After we had sipped a little glass of brandy, Captain Mauger desired to do me the honors of the garden. Rose excused herself for her inability to accompany us, because of her asthma, and counselled us not to stay too long. "Besides," said she, jokingly, "I am watching you." The captain took me through the paths, among the beds bordered with box and filled with flowers. He told me the names of the prettiest ones, remarking each time that there were no such to be seen in the garden of that pig of a Lanlaire. Suddenly he plucked a little orange-colored flower, odd and charming, twirled the stem gently in his fingers, and asked me: "Did you ever eat any of these?" I was so surprised by this preposterous question that I stood with mouth closed. The captain declared: "Well, I have eaten them. They are perfect to the taste. I have eaten all the flowers that are here. Some are good; some are not so good; and some don't amount to much. But, as for me, I eat everything." He winked, clacked his tongue, tapped his belly, and repeated in a louder voice, in which an accent of defiance was uppermost: "I eat everything, I do." The way in which the captain had just proclaimed this strange confession of faith revealed to me that his vanity in life was to eat everything. I amused myself in humoring his mania. "And you are right, Captain." "Surely," he answered, not without pride. "And it is not only plants that I eat; I eat animals also,--animals that nobody else has eaten,--animals that are not known. I eat everything, I do." We continued our walk among the flower-beds, through the narrow paths where pretty corollas, blue, yellow, and red, were swaying in the breeze. And, as he looked at the flowers, it seemed to me that the captain's belly gave little starts of joy. His tongue passed over his chapped lips with a slight smack. He said to me further: