That benevolent Indian was quite as ready to go to market as to abate human nuisances.  And Doctor Chantry said he could almost see English beef and ale across the channel; but translated into French they would, of course, be nothing but poulet and sour wine.  I pillowed his feet with a bag of down which he had kicked off his bed, and Skenedonk and I lingered along the paving as we had many a time lingered through the woods.  There were book stalls a few feet square where a man seemed smothered in his own volumes; and victual shops where you could almost feed yourself for two or three sous; and people sitting outdoors drinking wine, as if at a general festival.  I thought Paris had comfort and prosperity—­with hereditary kings overthrown and an upstart in their place.  Yet the streets were dirty, with a smell of ancientness that sickened me.

We got a loaf of bread as long as a staff, a pat of butter in a leaf, and a bottle of wine.  My servant, though unused to squaw labor, took on himself the porterage of our goods, and I pushed from street to street, keenly pleased with the novelty, which held somewhere in its volatile ether the person of Madame de Ferrier.

Skenedonk blazed our track with his observant eye, and we told ourselves we were searching for Doctor Chantry’s beef.  Being the unburdened hunter I undertook to scan cross places, and so came unexpectedly upon the Rue St. Antoine, as a man told me it was called, and a great hurrahing that filled the mouths of a crowd blocking the thoroughfare.

“Long live the emperor!” they shouted.

The man who told me the name of the street, a baker all in white, with his tray upon his head, objected contemptuously.

“The emperor is not in Paris:  he is in Boulogne.”

“You never know where he is—­he is here—­there—­everywhere!” declared another workman, in a long dark garment like a hunting-shirt on the outside of his small clothes.

“Long live the emperor!—­long live the emperor!”

I pushed forward as two or three heavy coaches checked their headlong speed, and officers parted the crowd.

“There he is!” admitted the baker behind me.  Something struck me in the side, and there was Bellenger the potter, a man I thought beyond the seas in America.  His head as I saw it that moment put the emperor’s head out of my mind.  He had a knife, and though he had used the handle, I foolishly caught it and took it from him.  With all his strength he then pushed me so that I staggered against the wheel of a coach.

“Assassin!” he screamed; and then Paris fell around my ears.

If anybody had seen his act nobody refrained from joining in the cry.

“Assassin!  Assassin!  To the lamp post with him!”

I stood stupefied and astonished as an owl blinking in the sunshine, and two guards held my collar.  The coaches lashed away, carrying the man of destiny—­as I have since been told he called himself—­as rapidly as possible, leaving the victim of destiny to be bayed at by that many-headed dog, the mongrel populace of Paris.