BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. INTERNATIONAL PRESS ASSOCIATION. A 1. A CJ AV A. iiu x naa seal lor the doctor from Bourron before six. About eight some villagers came round for the per formance and were told how matters stood. It seemed a liberty for a mountebank to fall .and they made off again in dudgeon. Uy ten Madame Tentaillon was gravely .alarmed, and had sent down the street for Doctor Desprez. The Doctor was at work over his manuscripts in one corner of the little dining-room, and his wife was asleep over the fire in another, when the mes senger arrived. “Sapristi!” said the Doctor, “you ■should have sent for me before. It was a case for hurry.” And he followed * the messenger as he was, in his slip pers and skull-cap. The inn was not thirty yards away, but the messenger did not stop there; he went in at one door and out by an other inio the court, and then led the way by a flight of steps beside the -stable, to the loft where the mounte bank lay sick. If Doctor Desprez were to live a thousand years, he would never forget his arrival in that room; for not only was the scene picturesque, but the moment made a date in his exist ence. We reckon our lives, I hardly know why, from the date of our first sorry appearance in society, as if from a first humiliation; for no actor can come upon the stage with a worse grace. Not to go further back, which would be judged too curious, there are subsequently many moving and decis ive accidents in the lives of all which would make as logical a period as this of birth. And here, for instance, Doctor Desprez, a man past forty, who had made what is called a failure in life, and was moreover married, found himself at a new point of departure when he opened the door of the loft above Tentaillon’s stable. It was a large place, lighted only by a single candle set upon the floor. The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man, with a Qdixotic nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon stooped over him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with - his feet dangling. These three were the ms wun me same inquiring, melan choly gaze. At last the Doctor hit cn the solu tion at a leap. He remembered the look now. The little fellow, although he was as straight as a dart, had the eyes that go usually wfth a crooked hack; he was not at all deformed, and yet a deformed person seemed to be looking at you from below his brows. The Doctor drew a long breath, he wa9 so much relieved to find a theory (for he loved theories) and to explain away his interest. For all that, he despatched the in valid with unusual haste, and, still kneeling with one knee on the floor, turned a little round and looked the boy over at his leisure. The boy- was not in the least put out, but looked placidly back at the Doctor. “Is this your father?” asked Des prez. “Oh, no,” returned the boy; “my master.” “Are you fond of him?” continued the Doctor. “No, sir,” said the boy. Madame Tentaillon and Desprez ex changed expressive glances. “That is bad, my man,” resumed the latter, with a shade of sternness “Every one should be fond of the dy ing, or conceal their sentiments; and your master here is dying. If I have watched a bird a little while stealing my cherries, I have a thought of dis appointment when he flies away over my garden wall, and I see him steer for the forest and vanish. How much more a creature such as this, so strong, so astute, so richly endowed with facul ties! When I think that, in a few hours, the speech will be silenced, the breath extinct, and even the shadow vanished from the wall, I who never saw him, this lady who knew him only as a guest, are touched with some affection.” The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be reflecting. “You did not know him,” he replied at last. “He was a bad man.” “He is a little pagan,” said the land lady. “For that matter, they are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not. They have no interior.” But the Doctor was still scrutinizing the little pagan, his eyebrows knotted and uplifted. “What is your name?” he asked. “Jean-Marie,” said the lad. Desprez leaped upon him with one of his , sudden flashes of excitement. FELT HIS PULSE. only occupants, except the shadows. But the shadows were a company in themselves; the extent of the room exaggerated them to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the candle the light struck upward and produced deformed foreshortenings. The mounte bank’s profile was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and it was strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the flame was blown about by draughts. As for Madame Tentaillon, her shadow was no more than a gross hump of shoulders, with now and again a hemisphere of head. The chair legs were spindled out as long as stilts, and the boy sat perched atop of them. It was the boy who took the Doctor’s fancy. He had a great arched skull, the forehead and the hands of a musi cian, and a pair of haunting eyes. It was not merely that these eyes were large, or steady, or the softest ruddy brown. There was a look in them, be sides, which thrilled the Doctor, and made him half uneasy. He was sure he had seen such a look before, and yet he could not remember how or where. It was as if this boy, who was quite a stranger to him, had the eyes of an old friend or an old enemy. And the boy would give him no peace; he ■seemed profoundly indifferent to what was going on, or rather abstracted from it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap. But, for all that, his eyes kept following the Doc tor about the room with a thoughtful fixity of gaze. Desprez could not tell whether he was fascinating the boy, •or the boy was fascinating him. He busied himself over the sick man: he put queijons. he felt his pulse, he jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still, whenever he looked round, •there were the brown eyes waiting for and felt his head all over from an ethnological point of view. “Celtic, Celtic!” he said. “Celtic!” cried Madame Tentalllon, who had perhaps confounded the word with hydrocephalous. “Poor lad! la it dangerous?” “That depends,” returned the Doctor, grimly. And then once more address ing the boy: “And what do you do for your living, .Tean-Marie?" he inquired. “I tumble,”' was the answer. “So! Tumble?” repeated Desprez, “Probably healthful. I hazard the guess, Madame Tentaillon, that tumb ling is a healthful way of life. And have you never done anything else but tumble?” “Before I learned that, I used to steal,” answered Jean-Marie gravely. “Upon my word!” cried the Doctor. “You are a nice little man for your age. Madame, when my confrere comes from Bourron, you will com municate my unfavorable opinion. I leave the case in his hands; but of course, on any alarming symptom, above all If there should be a sign of rally, do not hesitate to knock me up. I am a doctor no longer, I thank God; but I have been one. Good night, madame. Good sleep to you, Jean Marie.” CHAPTER II. UOIUK UKSPKEZ - always rose early. ; Before the smoke : arose, before the i first cart rattled over the bridge to the day’s labor in the fields, he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch of grapes; uuw ue wuuiu eat a Dig pear unaer tne trellis; now he would draw all sorts ot fancies on the path with the end of his cane; now he would go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber landing-place at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to say, for making theories like the early morning. "I rise earlier than any one else m the village,” he once boasted. "It is a fair consequence that I know more and wish to do less with my knowledge.” The doctor was a connoisseur of sun rises, and loved a good theatrical effect to usher in the day. He had a theory of dew, by which he could predict the weather. Indeed, most things served him to that end; the sound of the bells from all the neighboring villages, the omell of the forest, the visits and the behavior of both birds and fishes, the look of the plants in ‘his garden, the disposition of cloud, the color of the light, and last, although not Uast, the arsenal of meteorological instruments in a louvre-boarded hutch upon tho lawn. Ever since he had settled at Gretz, he had been growing more and more into the local meteorologist, the unpaid champion of the local climate. He thought at first there was no place so healthful in the arrondissement. By the end of the second year, he pro tested there was none so wholesome In the whole department. And for some time before he met Jean-Marie he had been prepared to challenge all France and the better part of Europe for a rival to his chosen spot. “Doctor,” he would say— "doctor is a foul word. It should not be used tc ladies. It implies disease. I remark it, as a flaw in our civilization that we have not the proper horror of disease. Now I, for my part, have washed my hands of it; I have renounced my laur eation; I am no doctor; I am only a worshiper of the true goddess Hygeia. Ah, believe me, it is she who has the cesius. And here, in this exiguous hamlet, has she placed her shrine; here she dwells and lavishes her gifts; here I walk with her in the early morning, and she shows me how strong she has made the > peasants, how fruitful she has made the fields, how the trees grow up tall and comely under her eyes, and the fishes in the river become clean and agile at her presence.—Rheuma tism!” he would cry, on some malapert interruption. “O. ves. I helleve w» Hr have a little rheumatism. That could hardly be avoided, you know, on s river. And of course the place stands a little low; and the meadows art marshy, thera’s no doubt. But my dear sir, look at Bourron! Bourron stands high. Bourron is close to the forest; plenty of ozone there, you would say. Well, compared with Gretz, Bour ron is a perfect chambles.” The morning after he had been sum moned to the dying mountebank, the Doctor visited the wharf at the tail of his garden, and had a long look at the running water. This he called prayer; but whether his adorations were ad dressed to the goddess Hygeia or some more orthodox deity, never plainly ap peared. For he had uttered doubtful oracles, sometimes declaring that a river was a type of bodily health, sometimes extolling It as a great moral preacher, continually preaching peace, continuity, and diligence to man’s tor mented spirits. After he had watched a mile or so of the clear water running by before his eyes, seen a fish or two come to the surface with a gleam of silver, and sufficiently admired the long shadows of the trees falling half across the river from the opposite bank with patches of moving sunlight in between, he strolled once more up the garden and through his house into the street, feeling cool :nd renovated. ■■