The boy climbed up the three steps with difficulty, carrying the baby, and hesitated for a moment at the door.  On the ceiling was written in large letters: 

    URSUS, PHILOSOPHER

It was the house of Ursus the child had come to.  Homo had been growling, Ursus speaking.

The child made out near the stove an elderly man, who, as he stood, reached the roof of the caravan.

“Come in!  Put down your bundle!” said Ursus.  “How wet you are, and half frozen!  Take off those rags, you young villain!”

He tore off the boy’s rags, clothed him in a man’s shirt and a knitted jacket, rubbed the boy’s limbs and feet with a woollen rag, found there was nothing frost-bitten, and gave him his own scanty supper to eat.

“I have worked all day and far into the night on an empty stomach,” muttered Ursus, “and now this dreadful boy swallows up my food.  However, it’s all one.  He shall have the bread, the potato, and the bacon, but I will have the milk.”

Just then the infant began to wail.  Ursus fed it with the milk by means of a small bottle, took off the tatters in which it was wrapped, and swathed it in a large piece of dry, clean linen.

When the boy had finished his supper, Ursus asked him who he was, but he could get no answer save that he had been abandoned that night.

“But you must have relations, since you have this baby sister.”

“It is not my sister; it is a baby that I found.”

Ursus listened to the boy’s story.  Then he brought out an old bearskin, laid it on a chest, placed the sleeping infant on this, and told the boy to lie down beside the baby.  Ursus rolled the bearskin over the children, tucked it under their feet, and went out into the night to see if the woman could be saved.

He returned at dawn; his efforts had been fruitless.  The boy had awakened at hearing Ursus, and for the first time the latter saw his face.

“What are you laughing at?  You are frightful!  Who did that to you?” said Ursus.

The boy answered, “I am not laughing.  I have always been like this.”

Ursus turned away, and muttered, “I thought that sort of work was out of date.”  He took down an old book, and read in Latin that, by slitting the mouth and performing other operations in childhood, the face would become a mask whose owner would be always laughing.

At that moment the infant awoke, and Ursus gave it what was left of the milk.

The baby girl was blind.  Ursus had already decided that he and Homo would adopt the two children.

II.—­Gwynplaine and Dea

Gwynplaine was a mountebank.  As soon as he exhibited himself all who saw him laughed.  His laugh created the laughter of others, though he did not laugh himself.  It was his face only that laughed, and laughed always with an everlasting laugh.

Fifteen years had passed since the night when the boy came to the caravan at Weymouth, and Gwynplaine was now twenty-five.  Ursus had kept the two children with him; the blind girl he called Dea.  The boy said he had always been called Gwynplaine.  Of course the two were in love.