into the sea. It grew dusk over the desolate marsh. Stray flights of plovers, now that the tide was again on its ebb, began to choose their resting places for the night.

"I'm going out to take a look," said the curé. Again, like some gopher of the prairie, he rose up out of his burrow.

Presently he returned, the old enthusiastic gleam in his eyes.

"The wind's changing," he announced. "It will be in the north again to-night; we shall have a full moon and better luck, I hope. Do you know," he went on excitedly, "that one night last October I killed forty-two ducks alone in this old gabion. Forty-two! Twenty mallards and the rest Vignon—and not a shot before one o'clock in the morning. Then they came in, right and left. I believe my faithful decoys will remember that night until their dying day. Ah, it was glorious! Glorious!" His tanned, weather-beaten features wrinkled with delight; he had the skin of a sailor, and I wondered how often the marsh had hid him. "Ah, my friend," he said, with a sigh, as we sat down to the remainder of the chicken and vin ordinaire for supper, this time including the cheese, "it is not easy for a curé to shoot. My good children of the village do not mind, but——" He hesitated, running his long, vibrant fingers through his hair.

"What then? Tell me," I ventured. "It will go no further, I promise you."

"Rome!" he whispered. "I have already received a letter, a gentle warning from the palace; but I have a good friend in Cardinal Z. He understands."

During the whole of that cold moonlight we took turns of two hours each; one sleeping while the other watched in the chair drawn up close to the firing-slit.

What a night!

The marsh seen through the firing-slit, with its overhanging eyebrow of sod, seemed not of this earth. The nine black decoys picketed before us straining at their cords, gossiping, dozing for a moment, preening their wings or rising up for a vigorous stretch, appeared by some curious optical illusion four times their natural size; now they seemed to be black dogs, again a group of sombre, misshapen gnomes.

While I watched, the curé slept soundly, his body shrouded in the blankets like some carved Gothic saint of old. The silence was intense—a silence that could be heard—broken only by the brisk ticking of the curé's watch on the narrow shelf. Occasionally a water-rat would patter over the sunken roof, become inquisitive, and peer in at me through the slit within half a foot of my nose. Once in a while I took down the fat opera-glass, focussing it upon the dim shapes that resembled ducks, but that proved to be bits of floating seaweed or a scurrying shadow as a cloud swept under the moon—all illusions, until my second watch, when, with a rush, seven mallards tumbled among our decoys. Instantly the curé awakened, sprang from his cot, and with sharp work we killed four.

"Stay where you are," he said as he laid his gun back in its rack. "I'll get into my hip-boots and get them before the water-rats steal what we've earned. They are skilled enough to get a decoy now and then. The marsh is alive with them at night."