Something of the kind happened in the affair of the "Gray Fox," which once upon a time set my village in uproar. At that distant date one of the notables of the hamlet, a locksmith by trade, who had "inherited property," was Claude Guillorit. Without vanity in his Roman Emperor's name, he carried it with the quiet dignity of a man whose future is assured. He was a "scholar," incredibly learned in the accumulation of miscellaneous facts which almanacs spread even in the remotest districts. He quoted proverbs, was full of strange saws, foretold the future--approximately. He was to be met with by night, carrying a large basket, in search of simples, which have special virtues when gathered after sun-down. He brewed philters for the benefit of man and beast, and cured fevers, I must admit, more easily than he did locks. For, in spite of his explicit locksmith's sign, locks were wrapped in mystery for Claudit--so called "for short." Village housewives, whose furniture knows not intricate locks, are at the end of their resources when they have cleaned the rust off their keys, or smeared a creaky lock with oil. If the evil persisted, in those days, the cry of supreme distress used to be: "Go and get Claudit," even as Napoleon's cry was: "Send forward the guard!" when he was at the end of his genius. Accompanied by a formidable clatter of ironware, a little slim, spare, sharp man would approach, with long gray locks swinging about his face, after straggling from under a black round of which no one could have declared with any certainty whether it had been a hat or a cap at the time of the Revolution. But it was not his headgear that held the eye. What struck one, what fixed the attention, what filled even a person unacquainted with him with a sort of superstitious uneasiness, was the black dart of two small, lustreless eyes, which entered one's very soul and stuck there. When the shaft of Claudit's glance had pierced one, it was not to be plucked from the memory. The man, however, did not concern himself with the impression he produced; he never broke the silence except from necessity, and then spoke only of things pertaining to lock mending. When he had arrived before the recalcitrant lock, he would throw on the ground--together with the great basket from which he was never separated, and which no one ever saw open except on one memorable occasion--an iron hoop, whence hung an extraordinary number of queerly wrought and bent hooks; then he would kneel down as if in prayer, and apply his eye to the keyhole. After a moment of scientific examination: "_Pardine!_" he would cry--it was his favourite oath--"I see nothing at all."