stute, so richly
endowed with faculties! When I think that, in a few hours, the speech
will be silenced, the breath extinct, and even the shadow vanished from
the wall, I who never saw him, this lady who knew him only as a guest,
are touched with some affection.'

The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be reflecting.

'You did not know him,' he replied at last, 'he was a bad man.'

'He is a little pagan,' said the landlady. 'For that matter, they are
all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not. They
have no interior.'

But the Doctor was still scrutinising the little pagan, his eyebrows
knotted and uplifted.

'What is your name?' he asked.

'Jean-Marie,' said the lad.

Desprez leaped upon him with one of his sudden flashes of excitement, and
felt his head all over from an ethnological point of view.

'Celtic, Celtic!' he said.

'Celtic!' cried Madame Tentaillon, who had perhaps confounded the word
with hydrocephalous. 'Poor lad! is it dangerous?'

'That depends,' returned the Doctor grimly. And then once more
addressing the boy: 'And what do you do for your living, Jean-Marie?' he
inquired.

'I tumble,' was the answer.

'So! Tumble?' repeated Desprez. 'Probably healthful. I hazard the
guess, Madame Tentaillon, that tumbling is a healthful way of life. And
have you never done anything else but tumble?'

'Before I learned that, I used to steal,' answered Jean-Marie gravely.

'Upon my word!' cried the doctor. 'You are a nice little man for your
age. Madame, when my _confrere_ comes from Bourron, you will communicate
my unfavourable opinion. I leave the case in his hands; but of course,
on any alarming symptom, above all if there should be a sign of rally, do
not hesitate to knock me up. I am a doctor no longer, I thank God; but I
have been one. Good night, madame. Good sleep to you, Jean-Marie.'

CHAPTER II. MORNING TALK

Doctor Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, before the
first cart rattled over the bridge to the day's labour in the fields, he
was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch of
grapes; now he would eat a big pear under the trellice; now he would draw
all sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane; now he would
go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber landing-
place at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to say,
for making theories like the early mo