“I do not know, but I wish I might never see him again,” answered Jean.
“That is very wrong of you. Perhaps sometime I may marry Mr. Bulbul. Then he will be your master. What will you do then?”
“Perhaps I will run away.”
That angered the lady. “And perhaps I will send you away if you do not behave better and learn to like him.”
Now not far from the lady’s house there was a pasture, and in this pasture there was a bull,—a fine, handsome animal. Jean Malin often saw it there.
After a while Jean began to notice a curious thing. Whenever Mr. Bulbul came to the house, which was almost every day, the bull disappeared from the pasture, and whenever the bull was in the pasture there was nothing to be seen of the gentleman.
“That is a curious thing,” said Jean to himself. “I will watch and find out what this means. I am sure something is wrong.”
So one day Jean went out and hid himself behind some rocks at the edge of the pasture. The bull was grazing with his head down and did not see him. After a while the bull raised his head and looked all about him to see if there were any one around. He did not see Jean, because the little boy was behind the rocks, so the animal thought itself alone. Then it dropped on its knees and cried, “Beau Madjam, fat Madjam, djam, djam, djara, djara!”
At once the bull became a man, and the man was the very Mr. Bulbul who came to visit Jean’s mistress.
The boy was so frightened he shivered all over as though he were cold.