fortunate; outside"--the old man
smiled a smile of benevolent mendacity--"outside, nothing has happened."

Frowenfeld insisted savagely on speaking; but Agricola raised his voice,
and gray hairs prevailed.

"At least, what _has_ happened? The most ordinary thing in the world;
Professor Frowenfeld lost his footing on a slippery gunwale, fell, cut
his head upon a protruding spike, and went into the house of Palmyre to
bathe his wound; but finding it worse than he had at first supposed it,
immediately hurried out again and came to his store. He left his hat
where it had fallen, too muddy to be worth recovery. Hippolyte
Brahmin-Mandarin and others, passing at the time, thought he had met
with violence in the house of the hair-dresser, and drew some natural
inferences, but have since been better informed; and the public will
please understand that Professor Frowenfeld is a white man, a gentleman,
and a Louisianian, ready to vindicate his honor, and that Citizen
Agricola Fusilier is his friend!"

The old man looked around with the air of a bull on a hill-top.

Frowenfeld, vexed beyond degree, restrained himself only for the sake
of an object in view, and contented himself with repeating for the
fourth or fifth time,--

"I cannot accept any such deliverance."

"Professor Frowenfeld, friendship--society--demands it; our circle must
be protected in all its members. You have nothing to do with it. You
will leave it with me, Joseph."

"No, no," said Frowenfeld, "I thank you, but--"

"Ah! my dear boy, thank me not; I cannot help these impulses; I belong
to a warm-hearted race. But"--he drew back in his chair sidewise and
made great pretence of frowning--"you decline the offices of that
precious possession, a Creole friend?"

"I only decline to be shielded by a fiction."

"Ah-h!" said Agricola, further nettling his victim by a gaze of stagy
admiration. "'_Sans peur et sans reproche_'--and yet you disappoint me.
Is it for naught, that I have sallied forth from home, drawing the
curtains of my carriage to shield me from the gazing crowd? It was to
rescue my friend--my vicar--my coadjutor--my son--from the laughs and
finger-points of the vulgar mass. H-I might as well have stayed at
home--or better, for my peculiar position to-day rather requires me to
keep in--"

"No, citizen," said Frowenfeld, laying his hand upon Agricola's arm, "I
trust it is not in vain that you have come out. There _is_ a man in
trouble whom only yo