small diamonds, each of them worth three thousand pistoles.

“Ah, sir,” said the understrapper of justice, “had you commited ever so much villainy, this would render you the honestest man living, in my eyes. Three diamonds worth three thousand pistoles! Why, my dear sir, so far from carrying you to jail, I would lose my life to serve you. There are orders for stopping all strangers; but leave it to me, I have a brother at Dieppe, in Normandy. I myself will conduct you thither, and if you have a diamond left to give him he will take as much care of you as I myself should.”

“But why,” said Candide, “do they stop all strangers?”

The abbe of Perigord made answer that it was because a poor devil of the country of