me here," he shouted.

I obeyed trembling.

"If ever you lift up your voice again in this assembly, I will have you
boiled and served up with onion sauce, second-hand tripe that you are,
and you shall be eaten underdone. Now go."

I felt shrivelled to the size of a pea. Beneath Paragot's grotesqueness
ran an unprecedented severity. I was conscious of the accusing glare of
every eye. In my blind bolt to the door I had the good fortune to run
headlong into a tray of drinks which Cherubino was carrying.

The disaster saved the situation. Laughter rang out loud and the talk
became general. The interlude was forgotten; but the man who said he had
seen my master leading bears in Warsaw vanished from the Club for ever
after.

The next morning when I entered Paragot's room to wake him I found him
reading in bed. He looked up from his book.

"My little Asticot," said he, "leading bears is better than calumny, but
indiscretion is worse than both."

And that is all I heard of the matter. I never lifted up my voice in the
Club again.

There was a curious black case on the top of a cupboard in his room
which for some time aroused my curiosity. It was like no box I had seen
before. But one afternoon Paragot took it down and extracted therefrom a
violin which after tuning he began to play. Now although fond of music I
have never been able to learn any instrument save the tambourine--my
highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen"
and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina--and to this day a
person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an
uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the
gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with
stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of
Brahms's Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long hair worked in
unison with the music which filled the room with a wild tumult of
movement. I had not heard anything like it in my life. It set every
nerve of me dancing. I suppose Paragot found his interest in me because
I was such an impressionable youngster. When, at the abrupt finale, he
asked me what I thought of it, I could scarce stammer a word.

He gave me one of his queer kind looks while he tuned a string.

"I still wonder, my son, whether it would not be better for your soul
that you should go on scullioning to the end of time."

"Why, Master?" I asked.

"_Sacre mille diab