but his was never found. As the boat's hull seemed to have been cut in two, his wife for a long time expected, and feared, to see him come home, for if there had been a collision it might well be that the colliding vessel had taken him aboard, him alone of all the crew, and carried him off to distant parts.
By slow degrees she familiarized herself with the thought that she was a widow, but would never fail to be startled whenever a neighbor or a beggar or a vagrant peddler unexpectedly entered her house.
As she was passing along the Rue aux Juifs one afternoon, about four years after her husband's disappearance, she stopped in front of an old sea-captain's house who had died a short time before, and whose household goods were being auctioned off.
It so chanced that just at that moment they were bidding on a parrot, a green parrot with a blue head, who was considering the assemblage with an air of dejection and anxiety.
"Three francs!" exclaimed the auctioneer; "three francs, for a bird that can talk like a lawyer!"
A friend of the widow Patin gave her a nudge with her elbow:
"You've got plenty of money," she said; "you ought to buy that bird. It would be company for you; it's worth more than thirty francs, that bird is. You could get twenty or twenty-five for it, any time you wanted to sell it."
"Four francs! ladies, four francs!" the man continued. "He can sing vespers and preach as good a sermon as M. the curé. He is a wonder—a phenomenon!"
Madame Patin raised the bid fifty centimes and the
