don't want them to understand what you say. They pretend they do,
for they are too vain to admit their ignorance. The wise man profits by
the vanity of his fellow-creatures. If I were not wise after this
manner, should I be here eating herrings in Tavistock Street, Covent
Garden?"

I was too full of food and adoration to reply. I gazed at him dumbly
worshipping and choked over a cup of tea. When I recovered he questioned
me as to my home life, my schooling, my ideas of a future state and my
notions of a career in this world. The height of my then ambition was to
keep a fried-fish shop. The restaurateur with whom my good mother dealt
used to sit for hours in his doorway in Drury Lane reading a book, and I
considered this a most dignified and scholarly avocation. When I made
this naive avowal to Paragot, he looked at me with a queer pity in his
eyes, and muttered an exclamation in a foreign tongue. I have never met
anyone so full of strange oaths as Paragot. As to my religious
convictions, they were chiefly limited to a terrifying conception of the
hell to which my mother daily consigned me. In devils, fires, chains and
pitchforks its establishment was as complete as any _inferno_ depicted
by Orcagna. I used to wake up of nights in a cold sweat through dreaming
of it.

"My son," said Paragot, "the most eminent divines of the Church of
England will tell you that a material hell with consuming flames is an
exploded fallacy. I can tell you the same without being an eminent
divine. The wicked carry their own hell about with them during
life--here, somewhere between the gullet and the pit of the stomach, and
it prevents their enjoyment of herrings which smell vilely of gas."

"There ain't no devils, then?" I asked.

"_Sacre mille diables_, No!" he shouted. "Haven't I been exhausting
myself with telling you so?"

I said little, but to this day I remember the thrilling sense of
deliverance from a horror which had gone far to crush the little
childish joy allowed me by circumstance. There was no fiery hell, no
red-hot pincers, no eternal frizzling and sizzling of the flesh, like
unto that of the fish in Mr. Samuel's fish-shop. Paragot had transformed
me by a word into a happy young pagan. My eyes swam as I swallowed my
last bit of bread and butter.

"What is your name?" asked Paragot.

"Augustus, Sir."

"Augustus, what?"

"Smith," I murmured. "Same as mother's."

"I was forgetting," said he. "Now if there is one nam