“A Giant he is!  Faith, he could toss me over his shoulder like a meal-bag!” muttered the Blacksmith, who stood with crossed arms looking over the heads of the crowd.  “And the wicked face of him!  Ugh!  I would not wish a quarrel with him!”

But the little boys in the front row were most interested in the third tumbler, who stood between the other two, with his arms folded, ready to begin.

This also was a figure in green, with short trunks of tarnished cloth-of-gold.  But beside the Giant, in the same dress, he looked like a pigmy or a fairy mite.  This third tumbler was a little fellow of about eight, very slender and childish in form, but lithe and well-knit.  Instead of being dark and gypsy-like, as were the other three of the wandering band, this boy was fair, with a shock of golden hair falling about his shoulders, and with a skin of unusual whiteness, despite his life of exposure to sun and hard weather.  And the eyes that looked wistfully at the children in front of him were blue as the depths into which the skylarks were at that moment diving rapturously.  On the upper eyelid of the boy’s left eye was a brown spot as big as an apple-seed.  And this gave him a strange expression which was hard to forget.  When he was grave, as now, it made him seem about to cry.  If he should smile, the spot would give the mischievous look of a wink.  But Gigi so seldom smiled in those days that few perhaps had noted this.  On his left cheek was a dark spot also.  But this was only a bruise.  Bruises Gigi always had.  But they were not always in the same place.

“Oh, the sweet Cherub!” said a motherly voice in the crowd.  “I wonder if they are good to him.  They look like cut-throats and murderers, but he is like the image of the little Saint John in church.  Wolves, with a lamb in their clutches!  Save us all!  Suppose it were my Beppo!”

At these words of his mother’s, Beppo giggled, and the boy looked at him gravely.  The Hunchback with the drum had heard, too, and darted a furious glance into the crowd where the woman stood.  Then, giving a loud double beat on the drum, he signaled for the tumbling to begin.

The three kicked off the sandals which protected their feet, stepped upon the carpet, and saluted the spectators.  The Giant stretched himself flat, and, seizing Gigi in his strong arms, tossed him up in the air as one would toss a rubber ball.  Up, down, then back and forth between the elder tumblers, flew the little green figure, when he touched ground always landing upon his toe-tips, and finishing each trick with a somersault, easy and graceful.  The boy seemed made of thistledown, so light he was, so easily he rebounded from what he touched.  The children in the circle about him stared open-mouthed and admiring.  Oh! they wished, if only they could do those things!  They thought Gigi the most fortunate boy in the world.

But Gigi never smiled.  At the end of one trick the Giant growled a word under his breath, and made a motion at which the boy cringed.  Something had gone not quite right, and trouble threatened.  He bit his lip, and the performance went on as before.