salle d'etudes--an exile which was quite to his
taste; for he would go straight off to the lingerie and entertain
Mlle. Marceline and Constance and Felicite (who all three adored
him) with comic songs and break-downs of his own invention, and
imitations of everybody in the school. He was a born histrion--a
kind of French Arthur Roberts--but very beautiful to the female eye,
and also always dear to the female heart--a most delightful gift of
God!

Then he was constantly being sent for when boys' friends and parents
came to see them, that he might sing and play the fool and show off
his tricks, and so forth. It was one of M. Merovee's greatest
delights to put him through his paces. The message "on demande
Monsieur Josselin au parloir" would be brought down once or twice a
week, sometimes even in class or school room, and became quite a
by-word in the school; and many of the masters thought it a mistake
and a pity. But Barty by no means disliked being made much of and
showing off in this genial manner.

He could turn le pere Brossard round his little finger, and Merovee
too. Whenever an extra holiday was to be begged for, or a favor
obtained for any one, or the severity of a _pensum_ mitigated, Barty
was the messenger, and seldom failed.

His constitution, inherited from a long line of frugal seafaring
Norman ancestors (not to mention another long line of well-fed,
well-bred Yorkshire Squires), was magnificent. His spirits never
failed. He could see the satellites of Jupiter with the naked eye;
this was often tested by M. Dumollard, maitre de mathematiques (et
de cosmographie), who had a telescope, which, with a little
good-will on the gazer's part, made Jupiter look as big as the moon,
and its moons like stars of the first magnitude.

His sense of hearing was also exceptionally keen. He could hear a
watch tick in the next room, and perceive very high sounds to which
ordinary human ears are deaf (this was found out later); and when we
played blind-man's-buff on a rainy day, he could, blindfolded, tell
every boy he caught hold of--not by feeling him all over like the
rest of us, but by the mere smell of his hair, or his hands, or his
blouse! No wonder he was so much more alive than the rest of us!
According to the amiable, modest, polite, delicately humorous, and
even tolerant and considerate Professor Max Nordau, this perfection
of the olfactory sense proclaims poor Barty a degenerate! I only
wish there were a few mo