always be careful in regard to those things that large and rope-hardened fingers will handle. Thus the needles he chose had conspicuous eyes, while the cottons were stout and unlikely to break as some cottons will do on the least provocation. His buttons also he would have very strong; good, hefty bone buttons guaranteed not to split — Madame Roustan ordered them specially for him. And such purchases he invari- ably carried away in his pocket to a house lower down on the quay, the house where he had boarded since the death of his parents. It belonged to a woman of so venerable an age that, according to fable, she was nearly a hundred. Madame Roustan did up his small parcel with care, but her heart was angry and suspicious within her, for this woman had recently sent for a niece, on the pretext of failing activity and eyesight. It is true that this niece was only a child, a thin, quiet little girl still pale from the city, but as Madame Roustan was wont to remark, and with obvious truth: 'All cats were once kittens.' So now while she did up his parcel with care, her heart was angry and suspicious within her. She said — and it was extremely foolish, but then love is apt to make the tongue tactless —she said: 'All this buying of womanish things! If I were a hand- some young fellow like you, I would soon get a wife who would do my mending.* Then she looked a great deal which she did not say, so that Goundran shuffled about with his feet and nervously held out his hand for the parcel. Arid now Madame Roustan must laugh none too kindly: cTe, but perhaps you have a wife in your eye; though surely the little Elise is too young —she is fitter to play with dolls than to bear children. How- ever, as my grandmother used to say: