“I suppose you eat meat.”
“Not very often, either. We have bread and vegetables, and when we are rich we buy some cheese.”
“Why does your dog sniff so at every one passing by? Why does he bark so spitefully?”
“Ah, madam, you see each time that any one hands me a sou, thanks to his grimaces, I give him a little piece of bread. There, look at him now.”
At this moment somebody had just thrown a coin into the blind man’s bowl. The old man drew from his pocket a little piece of dry bread.
The animal fell upon it with such a cry of joy that one might have supposed he had just received the daintiest titbit in the world. He nearly devoured his master with caresses.
“At what time do you eat? Do you go home to your lunch?”
“No. I carry my lunch in a basket.”
I looked. It contained some crusts of bread and nothing else.
“Is that all that you have to eat?”