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The Man of Forty Crowns.
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then remains to him for himself and family? Tears, want, discouragement, despair, and thus he dies of fatigue and misery. If the vicar were paid by the country, he would be a comfort to his parishioners, instead of being looked on by them as their enemy."

The worthy man melted as he uttered these words; he loved his country, and the public good was his idol. He would sometimes emphatically say, "What a nation would the French be if it pleased!" We went to see his son, whom the mother, a very neat and clean woman, was nursing. "Alas!" said the father, "here thou art, poor child, and hast nothing to pretend to but twenty-three years of life, and forty crowns a year."


CHAPTER VIII.

ON PROPORTIONS.


The produce of the extremes is equal to the produce of the means; but two sacks of corn stolen are not, to those who stole them, as the loss of their lives is to the interest of the person from whom they were stolen.

The prior of ——, from whom two of his domestic servants in the country had stolen two measures of corn, has just had the two delinquents hanged. This execution has cost him more than all his harvest has been worth to him; and since that time he has not been able to get a servant.

If the laws had ordained that such as stole their