lows showered on him as thick as hail, and, disappearing under a shower
of slaps, the flour on his face and the red powder of his wig enveloped
him like a cloud. At last he exhausted all his resources of low
scurrility, ridiculous contortions, grotesque grimaces, pretended aches,
falls at full length, etc., till the ringmaster, judging this gratuitous
show long enough, and that the public were sufficiently fascinated, sent
him off with a final cuff.

Then the music began again with such violence that the painted canvas
trembled. The clown, having seized the sticks of a drum fixed on one of
the beams of the scaffolding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with the
bombardment of the bass-drum, the cracked thunder of the cymbals, and
the distracted wail of the clarionet. The ringmaster, roaring again with
his heavy voice, announced that the show was about to begin, and, as a
sign of defiance, he threw two or three old fencing-gloves among his
fellow-wrestlers. The crowd rushed into the tent, and soon only a small
group of loungers remained in front of the deserted stage.

I was just going off, when I noticed by my side an old woman who looked
with strange persistence at the empty stage where the red lights were
still burning. She wore the linen bonnet and the crossed fichu of the
poorer class of women, and her whole appearance was that of neatness and
honesty. Asking myself what powerful interest could hold her in such a
place, I looked at her with more attention, and I saw that her eyes were
full of tears, and that her hands, which she had crossed over her
breast, were trembling with emotion.

"What is the matter with you?" I said, coming near to her, impelled by
an instinctive sympathy.

"The matter, good sir?" cried the old woman, bursting into tears.
"Passing by this market-place--oh, quite by chance, I tell you (I have
no heart for pleasure)--passing before that dreadful tent, I have just
seen in the wretch who has received all those blows my only son, sir, my
sole child! It is the grief of my life, do you see? I never knew what
had become of him since--oh, since my poor husband sent him away to sea
as a cabin-boy. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger, sir. He robbed his
master--he, the son of two honest people. As for me, I would have
pardoned him. You know what mothers are. But my man, when they came and
told him that his son had stolen, he was like a madman. It was that that
killed him, I am sure. I have never seen th