The Argosy — page 148: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

134 The Miller's Revenge. rye Anicew. causing his children to grow up rickety and deformed; of making all his bargains prove unprosperous, and his life a senes of failures: and mistakes. Granting her, then, to possess this power, were it not wise to disarm any possible ill-feeling, by showing her such little kindnesses and attentions as could make the poor no poorer, while they might, perchance, result as a blessing in some way not foreseen. For Mére Babet was easily propitiated: a meal of humble food now and then, whenever she happened to be passing your way; a word of kindly welcome, and, if you could afford it, a copper or two by way of a parting gift. Show your interest in her by these and such like kindnesses, and you might rest assured that, as far as her good wishes availed, the lines of your life would be laid in pleasant places. ‘She was a very diminutive, shrivelled up old woman, and her age might range anywhere between sixty and a hundred. Granting her to be only the former age, although every one said she was much older, she was still preternaturally spnghtly and active. There was a restless, galvanic sort of life about her, that seemed to set the usual infirmities of old age at defiance. Her hair was perfectly snow-white; while her thick projecting eyebrows still retained, either naturally or artificially, all the blackness of youth. ‘Tt would perhaps be difficult to ascertain by what motives the old woman was influenced in acting as she did towards the miller of La Roquette. There might be some dim feeling of revenge at work in her heart, bred there by the contumely with which Pierre Lebrun had ventured on one or two occasions to treat her. And yet the method of her revenge, if revenge it were, was so paltry and utterly despicable, as to be quite unworthy of being dignified with so imposing a name. Necessity could not be pleaded as her excuse for the theft. She was never in absolute want. At any time she could have given a list of twenty houses, at any one of which a night’s shelter and a plentiful supper and breakfast were at her command. It is possible that the theft of the flour was merely intended as the first of a series of petty annoyances ; or she may have thought that a robbery so mysterious might touch the superstitious chord of Lebrun’s nature, and that he might be more effectually worked upon through his fears than by any other means at her command. Unfortunately for her, her estimate of Lebrun’s character was not quite correct ; as a result of which mistake she was now in his power, and there was no one to deliver her out of his hands. ‘When Meére Babet recovered her senses, an operation which was facilitated by a quantity of cold water which the miller threw over her, she found herself bound hand and foot with a thin cord, which Lebrun had wrapped round her again and again, till she was almost as powerless as a mummy to stir any part of her except her head. What was he going to do with her? Her frightened eyes stared the question ECOMicoOolkxs.cO©