“What, examine my titles! I have driven away with my whip a recorder sent by a duke and a peer, a marshal of France, and I must go and submit to the arbitration of those old tar-jackets, who will descend from their wretched boats to mount their tribunal? I must go and take off my hat before those old scoundrels, who the very morning of their audience have cried in the port, ‘Buy--buy--soup--fish--buy--buy,’--a people that my family has loaded with benefits. In his last voyage to Algiers to redeem captives, did not my brave and good brother, Elzear, bring back from Barbary five inhabitants of La Ciotat? Did not my brother, the commander, three years ago, chase away with his black galley five or six chebecs from the coast, because they were interfering with these fishermen, and make them fly before him like a cloud of sparrows before a falcon? And these are the people who accuse me! Let them go to the devil! Let them send me their recorder, and they will see how I shall receive him. I have just had a new lash put on my whip! But enough of these miseries. Give me your arm, my daughter. The weather is fine; we will promenade. Come with us, Honorât.” “You will excuse me, father; I am needed at home, and I shall not be able to accompany you.” “So much the worse. Go, then, quick, so as to come back quicker still. I fear nothing from these idiot sheep penned up in La Ciotat, but if they make any attempts upon my fishing-nets, I shall need you to keep me from making Laramée hang several of them over my nets as scarecrows!” Then the baron, yielding to his changing and impetuous moods, altered his tone, and said, gaily, to the abbé, “Now, abbé, if I had some of these insolent rascals hanged, it would be serious, because I do not think you have in all your pharmacy a remedy for hanging.” “I beg your pardon, monseigneur, but I have been told that if you make the patient, before his execution, drink a great quantity of iron water, which, so to speak, envelopes and saturates the vital principle, and if, on the other hand, the patient will apply to his naked skin some large magnetic stones, or a loadstone, the power of the said stone is such that, in spite of the hanging, he will retain the vital principle in his body, for reason of the irresistible power of attraction possessed by this metal. I would not dare affirm it, but I have been recently told of this remedy.” “By Our Lady, that is a wonderful remedy, eh! Who informed you of it, abbé?” “A poor man, who gives very little thought to the welfare of his soul, but who knows many beautiful recipes,--it is the Bohemian who healed your greyhound, monseigneur.” “The Singer, Manjour! I imagine he occupies himself with the hanged and with hanging; he thinks of his future, you see. Each one preaches his own saint, does he not, abbé?--which does not prevent this vagabond being a skilful man. Never a better farrier lifted the foot of a hunting-horse than this same Bohemian,” added Raimond V.