Picture to yourself a little creature of fifty years old, with a little
round wrinkled face, a sharp nose, little, scarcely visible, brown
eyes, and thick curly black hair, which stood out on his tiny head like
the cap on the top of a mushroom. His whole person was excessively thin
and weakly, and it is absolutely impossible to translate into words the
extraordinary strangeness of his expression.
'What do you want?' he asked me again. I explained to him what was the
matter; he listened, slowly blinking, without taking his eyes off me.
'So cannot we get a new axle?' I said finally; 'I will gladly pay for
it.'
'But who are you? Hunters, eh?' he asked, scanning me from head to foot.
'Hunters.'
'You shoot the fowls of heaven, I suppose?... the wild things of the
woods?... And is it not a sin to kill God's birds, to shed the innocent
blood?'
The strange old man spoke in a very drawling tone. The sound of his
voice also astonished me. There was none of the weakness of age to be
heard in it; it was marvellously sweet, young and almost feminine in
its softness.
'I have no axle,' he added after a brief silence. 'That thing will not
suit you.' He pointed to his cart. 'You have, I expect, a large trap.'
'But can I get one in the village?'
'Not much of a village here!... No one has an axle here.... And there
is no one at home either; they are all at work. You must go on,' he
announced suddenly; and he lay down again on the ground.