He walked buoyantly home.  He had a room at the top of a house in an uptown cross-street.  Having locked his door and lighted a gas-jet he stood a long time before his mirror.  It was a friendly young face he saw there, but troubled.  The hair was pale, the eyes were pale, the nose small.  The mouth was rather fine, cleanly cut and a little feminine.  The chin was not a fighter’s chin, yet neither chin nor mouth revealed any weakness.  He scanned the features eagerly, striving to relate them with vaguely remembered portraits of Napoleon.  He was about the same height as the Little Corporal, he seemed to recall, but an eagle boldness was lacking.  Did he possess it latently?  Could he develop it?  He must have books about this possible former self of his.  He had early become impatient of written history because when it says sixteen hundred and something it means the seventeenth century.  If historians had but agreed to call sixteen hundred and something the sixteenth century, he would have read more of them.  It was annoying to have to stop to figure.

Before retiring he went through certain exercises with an unusual vehemence.  He was taking a course in jiu-jitsu from a correspondence school.  Aforetime he had dreamed of a street encounter, with some blustering bully twice his size, from which, thanks to his skill, he would emerge unscarred, unruffled, perhaps flecking a bit of dust from one slight but muscular shoulder while his antagonist lay screaming with pain.

With the approach of sleep all his half-doubts were swept away.  Of course he had been Napoleon.  He could almost remember Marengo—­or was it Austerlitz?  There was a vague but not distressing uncertainty as to which of these conflicts he had directed, but he could—­almost—­remember.

And he had been one who commanded, and who, therefore, would make nothing of pricing a dog.  He would enter that store boldly to-morrow, give its proprietor glare for glare, and demand to be told the price of the creature in the window.  Napoleon would have made nothing of it.

* * * * *

The old man came noisily from his back room and again glowered above his spectacles.  But this time he faced no weakling who made a subterfuge of undesired goldfish.

Bean gulped once, it is true, before words would come.

“I—­uh—­what’s the price of that dog in the window?”

The old man removed his spectacles, ran a hand through upstanding white hair, and regarded his questioner suspiciously.

“You vant him, hey?  Vell, I tell.  Fifdy dollars, you bed your life!”

The blood leaped in his veins.  He had expected to hear a hundred at least.  Still, fifty was a difficult enough sum.  He hesitated.

“Er—­what’s his name?”

“Naboleon.”

“What?” He could not believe this thing.

“Naboleon.  It comes in his bedigree when I giddim.  You bed your life I gif him nod such names—­robber, killer, Frenchman!”