“They have taken away my knife!” “Who have?” Lifting his arm, the tramp waved it in the direction of the town and gave no other answer. Yet he was following the course of his own slow thought, for presently he said: “They never gave it back to me.” He sat on in solemn silence, powerless to express the ideas that revolved in his darkened mind. His knife and his pipe were the only possessions he had in the world. It was with his knife that he cut the lump of hard bread and the bacon rind they gave him at farm-house doors, food which his toothless gums would not bite; it was with his knife that he chopped up cigar-ends to stuff them into his pipe; it was with his knife that he scraped out the rotten bits in fruit and with it he managed to drag out from the dung-heaps things good to eat. It was with his knife that he shaped his walking-sticks and cut down branches to make a bed of leaves for himself in the woods at night. With his knife he carved boats out of oak-bark for the little boys, and dolls out of deal for the little girls. His knife was the tool with which he practised all the arts of life, the most skilled, as well as the most homely, everyday ones. Always famished and often full of ingenuity, he not only supplied his own wants, but also made dainty reed fountains which were much admired in the town. For, although the man would not work, he was yet a jack of all trades. When he came out of prison nothing would induce them to restore his knife to him; they kept it in the record office. And so he went on tramp once more, but now weaponless, stripped, weaker than a child, wretched wherever he went. He wept over his loss: tiny tear-drops came, that scorched his bloodshot eyes without overflowing. Then, as he went out of the town, his courage returned, for in the corner of a milestone he came upon an old knife-blade. Now he had cut a strong beechen handle for it in the woods of the Bergères, and was fitting it on with skilful hands. The idea of his knife suggested his pipe to him. He said: “They let me keep my pipe.” Drawing from the woollen bag which he wore against his breast, a kind of black, sticky thimble, he showed the bowl of a pipe without the fragment of a stem. “My poor fellow,” said M. Bergeret, “you don’t look at all like a great criminal. How do you manage to get put in gaol so often?” Pied d’Alouette had not acquired the dialogue habit and he had no notion of how to carry on a conversation. Although he had a kind of deep intelligence, it took him some time to grasp the sense of the words addressed to him. It was practice that he lacked and at first, therefore, he made no attempt to answer M. Bergeret, who sat tracing lines with the point of his stick in the white dust of the road. But at last Pied d’Alouette said: “I don’t do any wrong things. Then I am punished for other things.” At length he seemed able to talk connectedly, with but few breaks.