oss places, and so came unexpectedly upon the Rue
St. Antoine, as a man told me it was called, and a great hurrahing that
filled the mouths of a crowd blocking the thoroughfare.

"Long live the emperor!" they shouted.

The man who told me the name of the street, a baker all in white, with
his tray upon his head, objected contemptuously.

"The emperor is not in Paris: he is in Boulogne."

"You never know where he is--he is here--there--everywhere!" declared
another workman, in a long dark garment like a hunting-shirt on the
outside of his small clothes.

"Long live the emperor!--long live the emperor!"

I pushed forward as two or three heavy coaches checked their headlong
speed, and officers parted the crowd.

"There he is!" admitted the baker behind me. Something struck me in the
side, and there was Bellenger the potter, a man I thought beyond the
seas in America. His head as I saw it that moment put the emperor's head
out of my mind. He had a knife, and though he had used the handle, I
foolishly caught it and took it from him. With all his strength he then
pushed me so that I staggered against the wheel of a coach.

"Assassin!" he screamed; and then Paris fell around my ears.

If anybody had seen his act nobody refrained from joining in the cry.

"Assassin! Assassin! To the lamp post with him!"

I stood stupefied and astonished as an owl blinking in the sunshine, and
two guards held my collar. The coaches lashed away, carrying the man of
destiny--as I have since been told he called himself--as rapidly as
possible, leaving the victim of destiny to be bayed at by that
many-headed dog, the mongrel populace of Paris.

IV

The idiot boy somewhere upon the hills of Lake George, always in a world
of fog which could not be discovered again, had often come to my mind
during my journeys, like a self that I had shed and left behind. But
Bellenger was a cipher. I forgot him even at the campfire. Now here was
this poor crazy potter on my track with vindictive intelligence, the day
I set foot in Paris. Time was not granted even to set the lodging in
order. He must have crossed the ocean with as good speed as Doctor
Chantry and Skenedonk and I. He may have spied upon us from the port,
through the barriers, and even to our mansard. At any rate he had found
me in a crowd, and made use of me to my downfall: and I could have
knocked my stupid head on the curb as I was haled away.

One glimpse of Skenedonk I caught