He was afraid of a
lady-bug, and had taken a very long time to become familiar with the turtle
which Cut-in-half handed over to him every morning. Thus Gringalet,
overcoming the alarm which spiders caused him, to prevent the flies from
being eaten, showed himself--"
"Showed himself as bold, in his way, as a man who would have attacked a
wolf, to take from him a lamb of the fold," said Blue Cap.
"Or as a man who would have attacked Cut-in-half, to drag Gringalet from
his claws," added Barbillon, also much interested.
"As you say," replied Pique-Yinaigre. "Accordingly, after these doings,
Gringalet did not feel so very unfortunate. He who never laughed, smiled,
looked wise, put on his cap sideways, when he had a cap, and sung the
Marseillaise with a trumpet air. At such times, there was not a spider that
dared to look him in the face! Another time it was a cricket that was
drowning and struggling in a gutter; quickly Gringalet bravely plunged two
of his fingers into the waves and caught the cricket, which he afterward
placed on a blade of grass; a champion swimmer with a medal, who should
have fished up his tenth drowned person, at fifty francs the head, could
not have been more proud than Gringalet, when he saw his cricket kick and
run away. And yet the cricket gave him neither money nor a medal, and did
not even say thank you, nor did the fly. 'But then, Pique-Vinaigre, my
friend,' will the honorable society say, 'what kind of pleasure could
Gringalet, whom every one beats, find in being the deliverer of crickets
and the executioner of spiders? Since others injured him, why did he not
revenge himself in doing harm according to his strength; for instance, by
causing the flies to be eaten by spiders, or in letting the crickets drown
themselves, or even drowning them himself.
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