THE DEVIL'S POOL
little boy, beginning to rub his eyes to show that he was thinking of tears.
"You know very well that grandpapa and grandmama do not wish it," said Germain, fortifying himself behind the authority of his elders, like a man who distrusts his own.
The child would not listen. He began to cry with all his might, saying that as long as his father was taking little Marie, he might just as well take him too. They replied that they must pass through great woods filled with wicked beasts who eat up little children. The gray would not carry three people; she had said so when they were starting, and in the country where they were going there was no bed and no supper for little boys. All these good reasons could not persuade Petit-Pierre; he threw himself on the ground, and rolled about, shrieking that his little father did not love him any more, and that if he did not take him he would never go back to the house at all, day or night.
Germain had a father's heart, as soft and weak as a woman's. His wife's death, and the care which he had been obliged to bestow all alone on his little ones, as well as the thought that these poor motherless children needed a great deal of love,
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