behind him. "Probably you have--"

Again I signed to him that I could not hear.

"You have heard of me?"

"From M. Gringuet?" I said very loudly.

"Yes," he answered in a similar tone; for, aware that deaf persons
cannot hear their own voices and are seldom able to judge how loudly
they are speaking, I had led him to this. "And I suppose that you will
do as he did?"

"How?" I asked. "In what way?"

He touched his pocket with a stealthy gesture, unseen by the people
behind him.

Again I made a sign as if I could not hear.

"Take the usual little gift?" he said, finding himself compelled to
speak.

"I cannot hear a word," I bellowed. By this time the crowd were
shaking with laughter.

"Accept the usual gift?" he said, his fat, pale face perspiring, and
his little pig's eyes regarding me balefully.

"And let you pay one quarter?" I said.

"Yes," he answered.

But this, and the simplicity with which he said it, drew so loud a roar
of laughter from the crowd as penetrated even to his dulled senses.
Turning abruptly, as if a bee had stung him, he found the place
convulsed with merriment; and perceiving, in an instant, that I had
played upon him, though he could not understand how or why, he glared
about him a moment, muttered something which I could not catch, and
staggered away with the gait of a drunken man.

After this, it was useless to suppose that I could amuse myself with
others. The crowd, which had never dreamed of such a tax-collector,
and could scarcely believe either eyes or ears, hesitated to come
forward even to pay; and I was considering what I should do next, when
a commotion in one corner of the square drew my eyes to that quarter.
I looked and saw at first only Curtin. Then, the crowd dividing and
making way for him, I perceived that he had the real Gringuet with
him--Gringuet, who rode through the market with an air of grim majesty,
with one foot in a huge slipper and eyes glaring with ill-temper.

Doubtless Curtin, going to him on the chance of hearing something of
the rogue who had cheated him, had apprised the tax-collector of the
whole matter; for on seeing me in my chair of state, he merely grinned
in a vicious way, and cried to the nearest not to let me escape. "We
have lost one rogue, but we will hang the other," he said. And while
the townsfolk stood dumbfounded round us, he slipped with a groan from
his horse, and bade his two servants seize me.

"And do you," he