“Then it’s your grandmother who makes the cabbage soup?”
“Yes, and she told me to be very careful and not break the bowl, like I did the other time.”
“Aha! so you’ve broken one before, have you?”
“Yes, and there wasn’t anything in it; but they licked me.”
“You don’t seem to be lucky with bowls. But the idea of whipping such a little fellow! These peasants must be very hardhearted. Poor boy! he is still sobbing; and he isn’t seven years old! So there’s no age at which we haven’t our troubles.”
The boy led Auguste across several fields, through the middle of which ran narrow paths. It took Auguste still farther from Monsieur Destival’s; but he did not choose to leave the child until he saw that he was happy. At last they reached a field of potatoes, and Coco stopped and grasped his companion’s arm with a trembling hand.
“There’s papa,” he said.
Some forty yards away Auguste saw a peasant plying the spade. He dropped the child’s hand and walked toward the peasant, who kept at his work, bent double over the ground.
“Père Calleux, I have come to make amends for a slight accident,” said Auguste, raising his voice.
The peasant raised his head and displayed a face covered with blotches, a huge nose, great eyes level with the face, a half-open mouth, and teeth that recalled those of Little Red Riding Hood’s enemy. That extraordinary countenance expressed profound amazement at hearing a fashionably-dressed gentleman call him by name.