l, and dressed like a Mulatto woman. The dog was always annoying
him, followed him, snapped at his legs, and at his old wig, with his
sharp teeth, and tore his coat and his silk pocket-handkerchief,
whenever he could get hold of it, to pieces. And the man used positively
to allow himself to be molested and bitten, played his part with dull
resignation, with mechanical unconsciousness of a man who has come down
in the world, and who gains his livelihood as best he can, and who has
already endured worse things than that.

And when half turning round to the two club men, with whom she had just
been dining at the _Cafe Anglais_, as she used her large fan of black
feathers, in a pretty, supple pose, with the light falling on to the
nape of her fair neck, Noele de Frejus exclaimed: "Wherever did they
unearth that horrible, grotesque figure?"

Lord Shelley, who was a pillar of the circuses, and who knew the
performances, the length of time the acrobats had been performing, and
the private history of all of them, whether clowns or circus riders,
replied: "Do not you recognize him, my dear?" "That lump of soot?... Are
you having a joke with me?"

"He certainly has very much changed, poor fellow, and not to his
advantage...Nevertheless James Stirling was a model of manly beauty and
elegance, and he led such an extravagant life that all sorts of stories
were rife about him, and many people declared that he was some
high-class adventurer...At any rate he thought no more of danger than he
did of smoking a good cigar.

"Do you not remember him at the Hippodrome, when he stood on the bare
back of a horse, and drove five other tandem fashion at full gallop and
without making a mistake, but checking them, or urging them on with his
thin, muscular hands, just as he pleased. And he seemed to be riveted on
to the horse, and kept on it, as if he had been held on by invisible
hands."

"Yes, I remember him...James Stirling," she said. "The circus rider,
James Stirling, on whose account that tall girl Caro, who was also a
circus rider, gave that old stager Blanche Taupin a cut right and left
across the face with her riding-whip, because she had tried to get him
from her...But what can have happened to him, to have brought him down
to such a position?"

Horrible, hairy monkeys, grimacing under their red and blue masks, had
invaded the arena, and with their hair hanging down on to their bare
shoulders, looking very funny with their long t