One night, Michel, by some accident, fell in with a little girl of ten years old, named Powleska, who was friendless, and on the verge of perishing with cold and hunger. The old man took her home, and adopted her; and, from that time, instead of sitting in the timber-yards, he went about the streets in her company, asking alms at the doors of the houses. The child called him _father_, and they were extremely happy together. But when they had pursued this mode of life for about five years, a misfortune befell them. A theft having been committed in a house which they had visited in the morning, Powleska was suspected and arrested, and the blind man was left once more alone. But, instead of resuming his former habits, he now disappeared altogether; and this circumstance causing the suspicion to extend to him, the girl was brought before the magistrate to be interrogated with regard to his probable place of concealment. “Do you know where Michel is?” said the magistrate. “He is dead!” replied she, shedding a torrent of tears. As the girl had been shut up for three days, without any means of obtaining information from without, this answer, together with her unfeigned distress, naturally excited considerable surprise. “Who told you he was dead?” they inquired. “Nobody!” “Then how can you know it?” “I saw him killed!” “But you have not been out of the prison?” “But I saw it, nevertheless!” “But how was that possible? Explain what you mean!” “I can not. All I can say is, that I saw him killed.” “When was he killed, and how?” “It was the night I was arrested.” “That can not be: he was alive when you were seized!” “Yes, he was; he was killed an hour after that. They stabbed him with a knife.” “Where were you then?” “I can’t tell; but I saw it.” The confidence with which the girl asserted what seemed to her hearers impossible and absurd, disposed them to imagine that she was either really insane, or pretending to be so. So, leaving Michel aside, they proceeded to interrogate her about the robbery, asking her if she was guilty. “Oh, no!” she answered. “Then how came the property to be found about you?” “I don’t know: I saw nothing but the murder.” “But there are no grounds for supposing Michel is dead: his body has not been found.” “It is in the aqueduct.” “And do you know who slew him?” “Yes—it is a woman. Michel was walking very slowly, after I was taken from him. A woman came behind him with a large kitchen-knife; but he heard her, and turned round: and then the woman flung a piece of gray stuff over his head, and struck him repeatedly with the knife; the gray stuff was much stained with the blood. Michel fell at the eighth blow, and the woman dragged the body to the aqueduct and let it fall in without ever lifting the stuff which stuck to his face.”