varicose-vein patients, who had returned at daybreak, obstinate but
patient.

The old man immediately began his explanation: "This began by a feeling
like ants running up and down the legs."

THE ARTIST

"Bah! Monsieur," the old mountebank said to me; "it is a matter of
exercise and habit, that is all! Of course, one requires to be a little
gifted that way and not to be butter-fingered, but what is chiefly
necessary is patience and daily practice for long, long years."

His modesty surprised me all the more, because of all performers who
are generally infatuated with their own skill, he was the most
wonderfully clever one I had met. Certainly I had frequently seen him,
for everybody had seen him in some circus or other, or even in
traveling shows, performing the trick that consists of putting a man or
woman with extended arms against a wooden target, and in throwing
knives between their fingers and round their heads, from a distance.
There is nothing very extraordinary in it, after all, when one knows
THE TRICKS OF THE TRADE, and that the knives are not the least sharp,
and stick into the wood at some distance from the flesh. It is the
rapidity of the throws, the glitter of the blades, and the curve which
the handles make toward their living object, which give an air of
danger to an exhibition that has become commonplace, and only requires
very middling skill.

But here there was no trick and no deception, and no dust thrown into
the eyes. It was done in good earnest and in all sincerity. The knives
were as sharp as razors, and the old mountebank planted them close to
the flesh, exactly in the angle between the fingers. He surrounded the
head with a perfect halo of knives, and the neck with a collar from
which nobody could have extricated himself without cutting his carotid
artery, while, to increase the difficulty, the old fellow went through
the performance without seeing, his whole face being covered with a
close mask of thick oilcloth.

Naturally, like other great artists, he was not understood by the
crowd, who confounded him with vulgar tricksters, and his mask only
appeared to them a trick the more, and a very common trick into the
bargain.

"He must think us very stupid," they said. "How could he possibly aim
without having his eyes open?"

And they thought there must be imperceptible holes in the oilcloth, a
sort of latticework concealed in the material. It was useless for him
to allow the public