"It's a well-known fact that the feu bellanger dislikes sharpened tools, and fights with them if he happens to meet them. Being aware of this, my brother and I went to a place where we had seen the monster on the previous night. We had a sharp knife. We placed it with the handle in the ground and the keen blade sticking out."
"We watched from a distance to see if the feu bellanger would pass that way, and seeing that it did not appear; when midnight came, we went home. But a neighbour told us on the morrow that he had seen it in the early hours of the morning, fighting against the knife.
"We straightway proceeded to the place where the knife was. Imagine our horror on finding that the blade was covered with blood."
"Some poor stray animal did suffer," Frank could not help remarking. Old Pierre was terribly displeased. He rose to go about his work, muttering: "Wait till he sees it, when he gets caught, I bet he'll turn blue."
Frank thought about his labourer's story during the whole of the afternoon. "These superstitions do a great deal of harm to these poor people," he said in a soliloquy.
He therefore resolved to try and root out all these strange notions from Pierre's head. He soon felt a kind of ecstacy. It was a glorious thing to help bring about the time when science would sweep away all traces of ignorance.
If the theory of evolution was true, those times would come, so he decided to set to work at once upon this man.
It was a beginning, small perhaps, but he now believed in small beginnings.
He had not yet experienced what it is to try and convert a superstitious man.
It is very difficult to convince an ignorant person.