Page:The red book of animal stories.djvu/343

321 A BOAR HUNT BY MOONLIGHT

was shortly before Christmas, when the days are at their shortest, when the sun sets before four o'clock and by five darkness has spread over the face of the land. One such evening there sat smoking and chatting in their comfortable sitting-room the inspectors and the book-keeper of a great estate in Poland, which belonged to a nobleman, but was under the management of a German steward.

'Children,' said the Inspector Wultkiewicz, 'in my rounds to-day I went past the pea-stacks of the Jaguicksy farm. You cannot imagine what havoc the wild boars have wrought there; if it is allowed to go on, by the spring the peas will be completely pulled up.'

At that moment the maidservant entered, and interrupted the conversation by announcing that supper was ready, and all the young men betook themselves to the steward's house across the way, to eat their evening meal in company with the steward's family. At table, the conversation again turning on the wild boars and the damage they had done, the book-keeper declared that in order to drive these pests away for ever it sufficed to shoot one.

Now this book-keeper, who, like the steward, was a German, was very clever at his own business, but, like many other people, believed that he could do everything. For instance, he considered himself an ideal of manly beauty, irresistible to ladies and unsurpassed in all knightly arts. In reality he was narrow-shouldered,