and smiles. And once Jean Le Nègre said to him as he squatted in the cour with his little son beside him, his broad strong back as nearly always against one of the gruesome and minute pommiers—
"Barbu! j'vais couper ta barbe, barbu!" Whereat the father answered slowly and seriously.
"When you cut my beard you will have to cut off my head" regarding Jean le Nègre with unspeakably sensitive, tremendously deep, peculiarly soft eyes. "My beard is finer than that; you have made it too coarse," he gently remarked one day, looking attentively at a piece of photographie which I had been caught in the act of perpetrating: whereat I bowed my head in silent shame.
"Demestre, Josef (femme, née Feliska)" I read another day in the Gestionnaire's book of judgment. O Monsieur le Gestionnaire, I should not have liked to have seen those names in my book of sinners, in my album of filth and blood and incontinence, had I been you.... O little, very little, gouvernement français, and you, the great and comfortable messieurs of the world, tell me why you have put a gypsy who dresses like To-morrow among the squabbling pimps and thieves of yesterday....
He had been in New York one day.
One child died at sea.
"Les landes" he cried, towering over The Enormous Room suddenly one night in Autumn, "je les connais commes ma poche—Bordeaux? Je sais où que c'est. Madrid? Je sais où que c'est. Tolède? Seville? Naples? Je sais où que c'est. Je les connais comme ma poche."
He could not read. "Tell me what it tells," he said briefly and without annoyance, when once I offered him the journal. And I took pleasure in trying to do so.
One fine day, perhaps the finest day, I looked from a window of The Enormous Room and saw (in the same spot that Lena had enjoyed her half-hour promenade during confinement in the cabinet, as related) the wife of The Wanderer, "née Feliska," giving his baby a bath in a pail, while The
