him.  In the course of a few days I had gathered from him a complete history of his circus-life, which was full of adventure and hardship.  He was, as I had thought then, somewhat of a novice in the circus business at the time we met in Turin, having left his home less than two years before.  He had indeed been associated as a regular member of the company only a few months, after having served a difficult and wearing apprenticeship.  He was born in Koloszvar, where his father was a professor in the university, and there he grew up with three brothers and a sister, in a comfortable home.  He always had had a great desire to see travel, and from early childhood developed a special fondness for gymnastic feats.  The thought of a circus made him fairly wild.  On rare occasions a travelling show visited this Transylvanian town, and his parents with difficulty restrained him from following the circus away.  At last, in 1873, one show, more complete and more brilliant than any one before seen there, came in on the newly opened railway, and he, now a man, went away with it, unable longer to restrain his passion for the profession.  Always accustomed to horses, and already a skilful acrobat, he was immediately accepted by the manager as an apprentice, and after a season in Roumania and a disastrous trip through Southern Austria, they came into Northern Italy, where I met him.

Whenever he spoke of his early life he always became quiet and depressed, and for a long time I believed that he brooded over his mistake in exchanging a happy home for the vicissitudes of Bohemia.  It came out slowly, however, that he was haunted by a superstition, a strange and ingenious one, which was yet not without a certain show of reason for its existence.  Little by little I learned the following facts about it:  His father was of pure Szeklar or original Hungarian stock, as dark-skinned as a Hindoo, and his mother was from one of the families of Western Hungary, with probably some Saxon blood in her veins.  His three brothers were dark like his father, but he and his sister were blondes.  He was born with a peculiar red mark on his right shoulder, directly over the scapular.  This mark was shaped like a forked stick.  His father had received a wound in the insurrection of ’48, a few months before the birth of him, the youngest son, and this birth-mark reproduced the shape of the father’s scar.  Among Hungarians his father passed for a very learned man.  He spoke fluently German, French, and Latin (the language used by Hungarians in common communication with other nationalities), and took great pains to give his children an acquaintance with each of these tongues.  Their earliest playthings were French alphabet-blocks, and the set which served as toys and tasks for each of the elder brothers came at last to him as his legacy.  The letters were formed by the human figure in different attitudes, and each block had a little couplet below the picture, beginning with the letter on the block.