your salary of eighteen pence a week. Your sensitive spirit would
revolt against taking service under anyone of Mr. Mammon's myrmidons,
and even if it didn't, I am sure he would not employ you. Like Caliban
no longer will you 'scrape trencher nor wash dish'--at least in the
Lotus Club--for from this hour I dismiss you from its service."

He smoked silently in his wicker chair, giving me time to realise the
sudden change in my fortunes. Then only did I understand. I saw myself
for a desolate moment, cast motherless, rudderless on the wide world
where art and scholarship met with contumely and undergrown youth was
buffeted and despised. My gorgeous dreams were at an end. The blighting
commonplace overspread my soul.

"What would you like to do, my little Asticot?" he asked.

I pulled myself together and looked at him heroically.

"I could be a butcher's boy."

The corners of my mouth twitched. It was a shuddersome avocation, and
the prospect of the companionship of other butcher boys who could not
draw, did not know French, and had never heard of Joanna filled me with
a horrible sense of doom.

Suddenly Paragot leaped up in his wild way to his feet and clapped me so
heartily on the shoulder that I staggered.

"My son," cried he, "I have an inspiration. It is spring, and the
hedgerows are greener than the pavement, and the high roads of Europe
are wider than Tavistock Street. We will seek them to-day, Asticot _de
mon coeur_; I'll be Don Quixote and you'll be my Sancho, and we'll go
again in quest of adventures." He laughed aloud, and shook me like a
little rat. "_Cela te tape dans l'oeil, mon petit Asticot?_"

Without waiting for me to reply, he rushed to the ricketty washstand,
poured out water from the broken ewer, and after washing, began to dress
in feverish haste, talking all the time. Used as I was to his suddenness
my wits could not move fast enough to follow him.

"Then I needn't be a butcher's boy?" I said at last.

He paused in the act of drawing on a boot.

"Butcher's boy? Do you want to be a butcher's boy?"

"No, Master," said I fervently.

"Then what are you talking of?" He had evidently not heard my answer to
his question. "I am going to educate you in the High School of the
Earth, the University of the Universe, and to-morrow you shall see a cow
and a dandelion. And before then you will be disastrously seasick."

"The sea!" I cried in delirious amazement. "We are going on the sea?
Where are