All these people, taken together, gather in this neighborhood something like three hundred bushels a day; the harvest lasts two weeks, and that makes four thousand five hundred bushels in this district alone.

The gleaning takes more from an estate than the taxes.

As to the abuse of pasturage, it robs us of fully one-sixth the produce of the meadows; and as to that of the woods, it is incalculable,--they have actually come to cutting down six-year-old trees.

The loss to you, Monsieur le comte, amounts to fully twenty-odd thousand francs a year." "Do you hear that, madame ?" said the general to his wife.
"Is it not exaggerated ?" asked Madame de Montcornet.
"No, madame, unfortunately not," said the abbe.

"Poor Niseron, that old fellow with the white head, who combines the functions of bell-ringer, beadle, grave-digger, sexton, and clerk, in defiance of his republican opinions,--I mean the grandfather of the little Genevieve whom you placed with Madame Michaud--" "La Pechina," said Sibilet, interrupting the abbe.
"Pechina!" said the countess, "whom do you mean ?" "Madame la comtesse, when you met little Genevieve on the road in a miserable condition, you cried out in Italian, 'Piccina!' The word became a nickname, and is now corrupted all through the district into Pechina," said the abbe.