e is a wonderful animal! Do you see? She
not only defends herself and ejects the wretch, but she puts her mark
upon him; she identifies him, ha, ha, ha! Look at the high art of the
thing; she keeps his hat as a small souvenir and gives him a receipt for
it on the back of his head. Ah! but hasn't she taught him a lesson?
Why, gentlemen,--it is--if it isn't that sorcerer of an apothecary!"

"What?" exclaimed the other two; "well, well, but this is too good!
Caught at last, ha, ha, ha, the saintly villain! Ah, ha, ha! Will not
Honore be proud of him now? _Ah! voila un joli Joseph!_ What did I tell
you? Didn't I _always_ tell you so?"

"But the beauty of it is, he is caught so cleverly. No escape--no
possible explanation. There he is, gentlemen, as plain as a rat in a
barrel, and with as plain a case. Ha, ha, ha! Isn't it just glorious?"

And all three laughed in such an ecstasy of glee that Frowenfeld looked
back, saw them, and knew forthwith that his good name was gone. The
three gentlemen, with tears of merriment still in their eyes, reached a
corner and disappeared.

"Mister," said a child, trotting along under Frowenfeld's elbow,--the
odd English of the New Orleans street-urchin was at that day just
beginning to be heard--"Mister, dey got some blood on de back of
you' hade!"

But Frowenfeld hurried on groaning with mental anguish.

CHAPTER XXXIII

UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL

It was the year 1804. The world was trembling under the tread of the
dread Corsican. It was but now that he had tossed away the whole Valley
of the Mississippi, dropping it overboard as a little sand from a
balloon, and Christendom in a pale agony of suspense was watching the
turn of his eye; yet when a gibbering black fool here on the edge of
civilization merely swings a pine-knot, the swinging of that pine-knot
becomes to Joseph Frowenfeld, student of man, a matter of greater moment
than the destination of the Boulogne Flotilla. For it now became for the
moment the foremost necessity of his life to show, to that minute
fraction of the earth's population which our terror misnames "the
world," that a man may leap forth hatless and bleeding from the house of
a New Orleans quadroon into the open street and yet be pure white
within. Would it answer to tell the truth? Parts of that truth he was
pledged not to tell; and even if he could tell it all it was
incredible--bore all the features of a flimsy lie.

"Mister," repeated the same child