ho laughed one hour often wept the next, he swore a lusty oath,
struck his thumb heavily on a certain bump in the skull he was
completing, and holding up his little doll, cried, 'Here is one who will
laugh at everything!'

I must now add what the legend neglects to tell. The model laugher
succeeded well enough in his own reign, but he could not beget a large
family. The laughers who never weep, the real clowns of life, who do
not, when the curtain drops, retire, after an infinitesimal allowance of
'cordial,' to a half-starved, complaining family, with brats that cling
round his parti-coloured stockings, and cry to him--not for jokes--but
for bread, these laughers, I say, are few and far between. You should,
therefore, be doubly grateful to me for introducing to you now one of
the most famous of them; one who with all right and title to be
lugubrious, was the merriest man of his age.

On Shrove Tuesday, in the year 1638, the good city of Mans was in a
state of great excitement: the carnival was at its height, and everybody
had gone mad for one day before turning pious for the long, dull forty
days of Lent. The market-place was filled with maskers in quaint
costumes, each wilder and more extravagant than the last. Here were
magicians with high peaked hats covered with cabalistic signs, here
Eastern sultans of the medieval model, with very fierce looks and very
large scimitars: here Amadis de Gaul with a wagging plume a yard high,
here Pantagruel, here harlequins, here Huguenots ten times more
lugubrious than the despised sectaries they mocked, here Caesar and
Pompey in trunk hose and Roman helmets, and a mass of other notabilities
who were great favourites in that day, appeared.

But who comes here? What is the meaning of these roars of laughter that
greet the last mask who runs into the market-place? Why do all the women
and children hurry together, calling up one another, and shouting with
delight? What is this thing? Is it some new species of bird, thus
covered with feathers and down? In a few minutes the little figure is
surrounded by a crowd of boys and women, who begin to pluck him of his
borrowed plumes, while he chatters to them like a magpie, whistles like
a song-bird, croaks like a raven, or in his natural character showers a
mass of funny nonsense on them, till their laughter makes their sides
ache. The little wretch is literally covered with small feathers from
head to foot, and even his face is not to be re