we hired ourselves out to an elderly couple, Monsieur and
Madame Dubosc, and spent toilsome but healthy days carting manure.
Although Paragot wrought miracles with his pitchfork, I don't think
Monsieur Dubosc took him seriously. Peasant shrewdness penetrated to the
gentleman beneath Paragot's blouse, and peasant ignorance attributed to
him the riches which he did not possess. They became great friends,
however, and before we left he succeeded in establishing himself as a
kind of oracle by curing a pig of some mysterious disease by means of a
remedy which he said he had learned in Dalmatia. Old Madame Dubosc shed
tears when we left La Haye.

Sometimes Paragot grew tired of tramping, and we travelled by rail, in
the wooden third class compartments of omnibus trains that stopped at
every station. Now and then pure chance took us to any particular town.
It was at Nancy that Paragot went to the ticket office and said with the
utmost politeness:--

"Monsieur, will you have the kindness to give me a ticket?"

"To what destination?" asked the clerk peering through his pigeon hole.

"_Parbleu_," said Paragot, "to any destination you like provided it is
not too expensive."

The clerk called him a _farceur_ and would have nothing to do with him,
but Paragot protested.

"Pardon, Monsieur, I have but one wish, to get away from Nancy. I have
seen the Episcopal Palace on the Place Stanislas, the Cathedral, and I
have viewed but I have not read the seventy-five thousand volumes in the
University Library. You know the places one gets to from Nancy, which I
do not. I am a stranger, in your hands. If you could suggest to me a
town about 100 kilometres distant----"

"There is Longwy," said the haughty official.

"Then have the kindness to give me two third class tickets to Longwy,"
said Paragot.

And to Longwy we went. Paragot contemplated the lack of interest in the
smug little town.

"To hold out Longwy as a goal to the enthusiastic Pilgrim to the Shrine
of Truth," said he, "could only enter the timber-built mind of a French
railway official."

The record of our wanderings would mark the stages of my own
development, but would be of little count as a history of Paragot. We
tramped and trained south through Italy and spent the winter in Rome.
Then it entered his head to obtain employment for both of us, as workman
and boy, on the excavations of the Forum. We lived in the slums with our
brother excavators, and were completel