him so peremptorily
from spending anything that he was firmly persuaded revolving-tables
and shooting-galleries were amusements only permitted to a class
of people to which he did not belong. Madame Ewans showed the
greatest interest in her son's success, urging him to give the
handle a good vigorous turn.

She was very superstitious about luck, "invoking" the big prizes,
clapping her hands in ecstasy whenever Edgar won a halfpenny
egg-cup, falling into the depths of despair at every bad shot.
Perhaps she saw an omen in his failure; perhaps she was just
blindly eager to have her darling succeed. After he had lost two
or three times, she pulled the boy away and gave the wooden disk
such a violent push round as set its cargo of crockery-ware and
glass rattling, and proceeded to play on her own account--once,
twice, twenty times, thirty times, with frantic eagerness. Then
followed quite a business about exchanging the small prizes for
one big one, as is commonly done. Finally, she decided for a
set of beer jugs and glasses, half of which she gave to each of
the two friends to carry.

But this was only a beginning. She halted the children before
every stall. She made them play for macaroons at _rouge et
noir_. She had them try their skill at every sort of
shooting-game, with crossbows loaded with little clay pellets,
with pistols and carbines, old-fashioned weapons with caps and
leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at all kinds of
targets--plaster images, revolving pipes, dolls, balls bobbing
up and down on top of a jet of water.

Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy or done so many
different things in so short a space of time.

His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and startling colours, his
throat parched with dust, elbowed, crushed, mauled, hustled by
the crowd, he was intoxicated with this debauch of diversions.

He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening her little purse of
Russia leather, and a new power was revealed to him. Nor was
this all. There was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden
horses of the merry-go-round to be mounted; they had to dash
down the great chute and take a turn in the Venetian gondolas,
to be weighed in the machine and touch the arm of the "human
torpedo."

But Madame Ewans could not help returning again and again to
stand before the booth of a hypnotist from Paris, a clairvoyante
boasting a certificate signed by the Minster of Agriculture and
Commerce and