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Just as he was setting out he returned to his dressing-room a moment, and told me to unbutton his coat and vest; and I saw the Emperor pass around his neck between his vest and shirt a black silk ribbon on which was hung a kind of little bag about the size of a large hazel-nut, covered with black silk.

Such strength upon the blow was put, The helmet crushed like hazel-nut, The axe-shaft, with its brazen clasp, Was shivered to the gauntlet grasp. Springs from the blow the startled horse, Drops on the plain the lifeless corse; First of that fatal field, how soon, How sudden fell the fierce De Bohun!

Now it fell out one day that this worthy man, coming home after a day's shooting, brought in his bag a little gipsy girl two or three years old, as lively as a squirrel, and as brown as a hazel-nut. He had found her in the bundle of an unhappy gipsy woman who had died of fatigue or hunger, or both, at the foot of a tree.

When the people saw the Hazel-nut child they were much astonished, and took him with the stork to the King of the country. The King was delighted with the little creature and kept him always beside him, and he soon grew so fond of the little man that he gave him a diamond four times as big as himself.

Nor was it that Canada believed the Empire's existence to be at stake. Many a time leaders of both parties had spoken fervently of coming to Britain's aid if ever she should be in serious straits. But few, if any, in Canada believed this to be such an occasion. In the phrase of a fervent Canadian imperialist, it seemed as if a hundred-ton hammer was being used to crush a hazel-nut.

In a minute or two up would pop the little head with the bright eyes, in the grass-plot, and Master Whiskey would sit on his haunches and listen, with one small ear cocked towards her. Then she would throw him a hazel-nut, and he would slip instantly down into his hole again.

In his hand he held a little plug of wood, and no sooner had Ill-Luck entered the nut than he stuck the plug in the hole, and there was man's enemy as tight as fly in a bottle. "So!" says St. Nicholas, "that's a piece of work well done." Then he tossed the hazel-nut under the roots of an oak-tree near by, and went his way. And that is how this story begins.

The trees grow to a height of six or eight feet; they bloom with a fragrant, white, star-like flower which on withering leaves the green embryo of the berry. When the berry has reached the size of a hazel-nut it turns red and is picked, much of the picking being done by women. The berries are poured into a simple machine which extracts the two coffee beans encased in each berry.

An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered remnants of leaves, interspersed with rank miserable meadow-trees, with hazel-nut thickets and dog-rose bushes, a piece of woodland in which husbandry and forestry are completely jumbled, is actually no longer a real forest.

"Here I am," says Ill-Luck "here in this hazel-nut, under the roots of the oak-tree." Thereupon the Fiddler laid aside his fiddle and bow, and fell to poking and prying under the roots until he found the nut. Then he began twisting and turning it in his fingers, looking first on one side and then on the other, and all the while Ill-Luck kept crying, "Let me out! let me out!"