the fantastic.

"_Mon Dieu!_" she said. "To think that there are Christians who dress
their children like this!" She sighed exhaustively, and, holding the
grotesque infant close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to
administer the very greatly needed motherment.

[Illustration: HE DEMONSTRATED THE PROPER APPLICATION OF THE CURE]

Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earned _dejeuner_
went forth with the car into the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply
his trade. First he unfurled the Hieropath banner, which floated
proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding table he displayed his
collection of ointment-boxes (together with pills and a toothache-killer
which he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a human foot on
which were grafted putty corns in every stage of callosity. As soon as
half-a-dozen idlers collected he commenced his harangue. When their
numbers increased he performed prodigies of chiropody on the putty
corns, and demonstrated the proper application of the cure. He talked
incessantly all the while. He has told me, in the grand manner, that
this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe
it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what
profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling
loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter
of fact, he revelled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to
the first lady who confessed the need thereof, and a blushing wench came
forward, the rascal revelled in the opportunity for badinage which set
the good-humoured crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric
power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its
high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the puckish swiftness and
mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a
success because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its
practice of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly, like his great
predecessor Tabarin of imperishable memory, and satisfying to the full
his instinct for the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he started
life in the brass-buttoned shell-jacket of a _chasseur_ in a Marseilles
cafe, and dreamed dreams of the fairytale lives of the clients who
came in accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had social
ambitions--and the social status of the mountebank is, to say the least
of it, ambiguous. Ah me! What