ow he did so, except
by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic toll of frequenters of the cafe,
would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his
friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is
comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the one thing easy
of attainment; the possible the one thing he never could achieve.
That was the paradoxical nature of the man. Before his days of
hunted-little-devildom were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge of
English to carry him, a few years later, through various vicissitudes in
England, until, fired by new social ambitions and self-educated in a
haphazard way, he found himself appointed Professor of French in an
academy for young ladies.

One of these days, when I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain,
unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological
sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in
his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during
a couple of decades, in a manner so confusing that for the present I
abandon such an attempt. All I know of the date of the episode I am
about to chronicle is that it occurred immediately after the termination
of his engagement at the academy just mentioned. Somehow, Aristide's
history is a category of terminations.

If the head mistress of the academy had herself played dragon at his
classes, all would have gone well. He would have made his pupils
conjugate irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the mysteries of the
past participle and the subjunctive mood, and turned them out quite
innocent of the idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But _dis
aliter visum_. The gods always saw wrong-headedly otherwise in the case
of Aristide. A weak-minded governess--and in a governess a sense of
humour and of novelty is always a sign of a weak mind--played dragon
during Aristide's lessons. She appreciated his method, which was
colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular. His lessons therefore
were a giggling joy from beginning to end. He imparted to his pupils
delicious knowledge. _En avez-vous des-z-homards? Oh, les sales betes,
elles ont du poil aux pattes_, which, being translated, is: "Have you
any lobsters? Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on their feet"--a
catch phrase which, some years ago, added greatly to the gaiety of
Paris, but in which I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit--became the
historic pro