Simon Grelu is a great tall fellow, all legs and arms and joints, with a long neck leading up to a long nose, which gives him the look of a heron. From the Marshland to the Woodland there is no more noted spoiler of rivers; he is celebrated for the constancy of his relations with the police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every angle of every rock, every stump by the water's edge, is so familiar and homelike to him that he cannot bear to leave his river, and rather than make good his escape on land, prefers to have a warrant served on him, secure in the fact that he has nothing wherewith to pay a fine. When the police sergeant rebukes his men for their laziness, they cry with one accord: "Let us go and look up Grelu!" They go, and find him without the least trouble. That was what happened last week, and owing to it I had the pleasure of witnessing the interview I am about to relate. I was taking a walk with the Mayor, when Simon Grelu suddenly stood before us. More elongated than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable from the threat of a single great black tooth which the slightest cough would inevitably have flung in one's face, the heron-man stood before us, motionless in his wooden shoes. "I have come for my certificate, _monsieur le maire_," said he with a sort of clucking which might express either mirth or despair. "What certificate?" "Why, my certificate of mendicancy, as usual, when I am caught." "What! Again? Is there no end to it?" "It is better than stealing, isn't it, _monsieur le maire_?" "But you have not the choice between poaching and stealing only, Simon. You could work." "And do you suppose I don't work? Many thanks! Who drudges more than I do? The whole night in the water! Those accursed policemen played a trick on me!" "They caught you?" "That's nothing. They made a fool of me, _monsieur le maire_. No, it can't be called anything else. I shall never forgive myself for being made a fool of----" "What happened?" "What happened is that those policemen laughed at me all the way up and down the river. They were half a mile away, and I could still hear them roaring with laughter. No, I never knew I was such a dunderhead." "But, come to the point, what did they do to you?" "Ah--the villains! Imagine, _monsieur le maire_, it was just before daylight, and I was quietly fishing below the mill of La Rochette. The idea, anyway, of forbidding fishing before sunrise! Is it my fault if fishes come out to play at night?" "Well--what happened?" "I was in my boat----" "You have a boat, then?" "No, _monsieur le maire_, I may as well tell you, for you'll know it to-morrow, anyway, that it was your boat, which I had taken from your dike by the big pasture." "And where did you get the key?"