"What are you laughing about?"

The boy answered,--

"I am not laughing."

Ursus felt a kind of shock, looked at him fixedly for a few minutes, and
said,--

"Then you are frightful."

The interior of the caravan, on the previous night, had been so dark
that Ursus had not yet seen the boy's face. The broad daylight revealed
it. He placed the palms of his hands on the two shoulders of the boy,
and, examining his countenance more and more piercingly, exclaimed,--

"Do not laugh any more!"

"I am not laughing," said the child.

Ursus was seized with a shudder from head to foot.

"You do laugh, I tell you."

Then seizing the child with a grasp which would have been one of fury
had it not been one of pity, he asked him: roughly,--

"Who did that to you?"

The child replied,--