iasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it
opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M. des Amis
presently took him more seriously in hand.

"Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than forty
livres a month," the master informed him at the end of a week. "For
the present, however, I will make up what else I consider due to you by
imparting to you secrets of this noble art. Your future depends upon
how you profit by your exceptional good fortune in receiving instruction
from me."

Thereafter every morning before the opening of the academy, the master
would fence for half an hour with his new assistant. Under this really
excellent tuition Andre-Louis improved at a rate that both astounded
and flattered M. des Amis. He would have been less flattered and more
astounded had he known that at least half the secret of Andre-Louis'
amazing progress lay in the fact that he was devouring the contents of
the master's library, which was made up of a dozen or so treatises on
fencing by such great masters as La Bessiere, Danet, and the syndic
of the King's Academy, Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose
swordsmanship was all based on practice and not at all on theory, who
was indeed no theorist or student in any sense, that little library
was merely a suitable adjunct to a fencing-academy, a proper piece of
decorative furniture. The books themselves meant nothing to him in any
other sense. He had not the type of mind that could have read them with
profit nor could he understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis,
on the contrary, a man with the habit of study, with the acquired
faculty of learning from books, read those works with enormous profit,
kept their precepts in mind, critically set off those of one master
against those of another, and made for himself a choice which he
proceeded to put into practice.

At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his
assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man
in a bout with whom it became necessary to exert himself if he were to
escape defeat.

"I said from the first," he told him one day, "that Nature designed you
for a swordsman. See how justified I was, and see also how well I have
known how to mould the material with which Nature has equipped you."

"To the master be the glory," said Andre-Louis.

His relations with M. des Amis had meanwhile become of the friendliest,
and he was now begin