les_," he cried, "do you think I am going to give you
a reason for everything? You'll learn fast enough."

He laughed and went on playing, and, as I listened, the more godlike he
grew.

"The streets of Paris," said he, returning the fiddle to its case, "are
strewn with the wrecked souls of artists."

"And not London?"

"My little Asticot," he replied, "I am a Frenchman, and it is our
fondest illusion that no art can possibly exist out of Paris."

I discovered later that he was the son of a Gascon father and an Irish
mother, which accounted for his being absolutely bilingual and, indeed,
for many oddities of temperament. But now he proclaimed himself a
Frenchman, and for a time I was oppressed with a sense of
disappointment.

At the Board School I had bolted enough indigestible historical facts to
know that the English had always beaten the French, and I had drawn the
natural conclusion that the French were a vastly inferior race of
beings. It was, I verily believe, the first step in my spiritual
education to realise that the god of my idolatry suffered no diminution
of grandeur by reason of his nationality. Indeed he gained accession,
for after this he talked often to me of France in his magniloquent way,
until I began secretly to be ashamed of being English. This had one
advantage, in that I set myself with redoubled vigour to learn his
language.

So extraordinary was the veneration I had for the man who had
transplanted me from the kicks and soapsuds of my former life into this
bewildering land of Greek gods and Ariels and pictures and music; for
the man who spoke many unknown tongues, wore a gold watch chain, had
been to Warsaw and every city mentioned in my school geography, and
presided like a king over an assembly of those whom as a gutter urchin I
had been wont to designate "toffs"; for the beneficent being who had
provided me, Gus Smith alias Asticot, with a nightshirt, condescended to
eat half my egg and to allow me to supervise his bedchamber and maintain
it in an orderly state of disintegration, hair-brushes from butter and
tobacco-ash from fish; for the man who, God knows, was the first of
human creatures to awaken the emotion of love within my child's
breast--so extraordinary was the veneration I had for him, that although
I started out on this narrative by saying it was Paragot's story and not
my own I proposed to tell, I hope to be pardoned for a brief egotistical
excursion.

Like the gentleman