Page:Gaston Leroux--The man with the black feather.djvu/321

Rh perhaps, at that point three inches deep, and when the little fish came swimming over it, to jerk up his hand and fling it on the bank. We examined his catch in the light of our lamp; but I was unable to say whether it was an Asellus Aquaticus or a Cyclops Fimbriatus.

"In the course of the next quarter of an hour we caught three more of these little fishes (they were nearly four inches long); then, at the sight of fresh fish, a wolfish gleam came into M. Longuet's eyes; and he suggested that we should repeat the supper we had only just finished. After his distasteful conversation of the afternoon, I made no objection. But with his ineradicable middle-class instinct he complained that we had no means of cooking our catch. I explained to him that our early ancestors, the cave-men, probably ate most of their food raw, and whatever else we were, we were, at the moment, undoubtedly cave-men. With this new intellectual alertness, acquired by following the method of M. Fletcher of the United States, he saw my point. We cleaned the fish with the knife of Signor Petito and ate them. They were delicious.

"But, as I should have foreseen, so much rich food coming suddenly after the rational diet on which we had subsisted during the last