appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had

stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking

on at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he,

with a final shrug of the shoulders. “The people from the market

did it. Let them bring another.”

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his

joke, he called to him across the way:

“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is

often the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely

failed, as is often the way with his tribe too.

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the

wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with

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a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.

“Why do you write in the public streets? Is theretell me thouis

there no other place to write such words in?”

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps

accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker

rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came

down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes

jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an

extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,