self with expectant smiles.
He shook off his wooden shoes and whirled upon one toe.

The doctor went into another room, his own apartment in the friar's
small house. His office fronted this, and gave him a door to the street.
Its bottles and jars and iron mortar and the vitreous slab on which he
rolled pills were all lost in twilight now. There were many other
doctors' offices in Kaskaskia, but this was the best equipped one, and
was the lair of a man who had not only been trained in Europe, but had
sailed around the entire world. Dr. Dunlap's books, some of them in
board covers, made a show on his shelves. He had an articulated
skeleton, and ignorant Kaskaskians would declare that they had seen it
whirl past his windows many a night to the music of his violin.

"What did you say had happened since I went away?" he inquired,
sauntering back and tuning his fiddle as he came.

"There's plenty of news," responded Father Baby. "Antoine Lamarche's
cow fell into the Mississippi."

Dr. Dunlap uttered a note of contempt.

"It would go wandering off where the land crumbles daily with that
current setting down from the northwest against us; and Antoine was far
from sneering in your cold-blooded English manner when he got the news."

"He tore his hair and screamed in your warm-blooded French manner?"

"That he did."

The doctor stood in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop
sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He
was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress
was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was pricked through by the
untidy growth of a three-days' beard, yet he looked very handsome.

Dr. Dunlap stood in the light, but Father Baby chose the dark for those
ecstatic antics into which the fiddle threw him. He leaped high from
the floor at the first note, and came down into a jig of the most
perfect execution. The pat of his bare soles was exquisitely true. He
raised the gown above his ankles, and would have seemed to float but for
his response in sound. Yet through his most rapturous action he never
ceased to be conscious of the shop. A step on the sill would break the
violin's charm in the centre of a measure.

But this time no step broke it, and the doctor kept his puppet friar
going until his own arm began to weary. The tune ended, and Father Baby
paused, deprived of the ether in which he had been floating.

Dr. Dunlap sat down, nursing the ins