"I can make a couple of dozen with four cents' worth, and it ought to catch half a dozen bunnies--and the snares are used over and over again--unless the gamekeepers seize them." "Here are four cents," said Aunt Angelique, "go and buy wire and get the rabbits to-morrow." Wire was cheaper in the town than at the village so that Ange got material for twenty-four snares for three cents; he brought the odd copper to his aunt who was touched by this honesty. For an instant she felt like giving him the cent but unfortunately for Ange, it had been flattened by a hammer and might be passed in the dusk for a twosous piece. She thought it wicked to squander a piece that might bring a hundred per cent, and she popped it into her pouch. Pitou made the snares and in the morning asked mysteriously for a bag. In it she put the bread and cheese for his meals, and away he went to his hunting ground. Meanwhile she plucked the robins intended for their dinner; she took a brace of larks to Abbe Fortier, and two brace to the Golden Ball innkeeper, who paid her three cents for them and ordered as many as she could supply at that rate. She went home beaming: the blessing of heaven had entered the house with Ange Pitou. "They are quite right who say a good action is never thrown away," she observed as she munched the robins, as fat as ortolans and delicate as beccaficoes. At dark in walked Ange, with the rounded out bag on his shoulders; Aunt Angelique received him on the threshold but not with a slap. "Here I am, with my bag," said he with the calmness of having well spent his day. "And what have you in the bag?" cried the aunt, stretching out her hand in sharp curiosity. "Beech-mast," replied Pitou. "It is this way. If Daddy Lajeunesse, the gamekeeper, saw me rambling without the bag he would want to know what I was lurking for and he would feel suspicion. But when he challenged me with the bag, I just answered him: 'I am gathering beechmast, father--it is not forbidden to gather mast, is it?' and not being forbidden, he could not do anything. So he said nothing except: 'You have a good aunt, Pitou; give her my compliments.'" "So you have been collecting mast instead of catching rabbits," cried Aunt Angelique, angrily. "No, no, I laid my snares under cover of mast-gathering: the old donkey saw me doing that and thought it right." "But the game?" said the woman, bent on the first principle. "The moon will be up at twelve and I will go and see how many I have snared." "You will go into the woods at midnight?" "Why, not? what is there to be afraid of?" The woman was as amazed at Ange's courage as at the breadth of his speculations. But brought up in the woods, Ange was not to be scared at what terrifies the town boy. So at midnight he set out, skirting the cemetery wall, for the innocent lad, never in his ideas offending anybody, had no more fear of the dead than of the living.