Page 283 - les-miserables

every passing year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his
strolls, but he rarely made use of it. When he did happen to
do so, his shooting was something so infallible as to inspire
terror. He never killed an inoffensive animal. He never shot
at a little bird.
Although he was no longer young, it was thought that
he was still prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance
to any one who was in need of it, lifted a horse, released
a wheel clogged in the mud, or stopped a runaway bull by
the horns. He always had his pockets full of money when
he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he
passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after
him, and surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.
It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a
country life, since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which
he taught to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy
scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it and the granary and inun-
dating the cracks in the floor with a solution of common
salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in
bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the
grass and in the houses.
He had ‘recipes’ for exterminating from a field, blight,
tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the
wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by
the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed in it.
One day he saw some country people busily engaged
in pulling up nettles; he examined the plants, which were
uprooted and already dried, and said: ‘They are dead. Nev-
ertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to make

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