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best soup in the world."

"Isn't it true, monsieur, that crows eat the dead?"

"You are a fool, Nanon. They eat what they can get, like the rest of
the world. Don't we all live on the dead? What are legacies?"

Monsieur Grandet, having no further orders to give, drew out his
watch, and seeing that he had half an hour to dispose of before
breakfast, he took his hat, went and kissed his daughter, and said to
her:

"Do you want to come for a walk in the fields, down by the Loire? I
have something to do there."

Eugenie fetched her straw bonnet, lined with pink taffeta; then the
father and daughter went down the winding street to the shore.

"Where are you going at this early hour?" said Cruchot, the notary,
meeting them.

"To see something," answered Grandet, not duped by the matutinal
appearance of his friend.

When Pere Grandet went to "see something," the notary knew by
experience there was something to be got by going with him; so he
went.

"Come, Cruchot," said Grandet, "you are one of my friends. I'll show
you what folly it is to plant poplar-trees on good ground."

"Do you call the sixty thousand francs that you pocketed for those
that were in your fields down by the Loire, folly?" said Maitre
Cruchot, opening his eyes with amazement. "What luck you have had! To
cut down your trees at the very time they ran short of white-wood at
Nantes, and to sell them at thirty francs!"

Eugenie listened, without knowing that she approached the most solemn
moment of her whole life, and that the notary was about to bring down
upon her head a paternal and supreme sentence. Grandet had now reached
the magnificent fields which he owned on the banks of the Loire, where
thirty workmen were employed in clearing away, filling up, and
levelling the spots formerly occupied by the poplars.

"Maitre Cruchot, see how much ground this tree once took up! Jean," he
cried to a laborer, "m-m-measure with your r-r-rule, b-both ways."

"Four times eight feet," said the man.

"Thirty-two feet lost," said Grandet to Cruchot. "I had three hundred
poplars in this one line, isn't that so? Well, then, three h-h-hundred
times thir-thirty-two lost m-m-me five hundred in h-h-hay; add twice
as much for the side rows,--fifteen hundred; the middle rows as much
more. So we may c-c-call it a th-thousand b-b-bales of h-h-hay--"

"Very good," said Cruchot, to help out his friend; "a thousand bales
are worth about six hundred francs."

"Say t-t-twelve hundred, be-c-cause there's three or four hundred
francs on the second crop. Well, then, c-c-calculate that t-twelve
thousand francs a year for f-f-forty years with interest c-c-comes
to--"

"Say sixty thousand francs," said the notary.

"I am willing; c-c-comes t-t-to sixty th-th-thousand. Very good,"
continued Grandet, without stuttering: "two thousand poplars forty
years old will only yield me fifty thousand francs.

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