credulity, and send him back to London loaded down with
misinformation.

'His cheek, by Christopher!' cried Chalks. 'Live in the Quarter for a
fortnight, keep his eyes and ears shut, talk perpetually of Davis
Blake, and read nothing but his own works, and then go home and write
a book about it. _I'll_ quarter him!'

But Chalks counted without his man. That Monsieur Bullier, the founder
of the Closerie des Lilas, was also Professor of Moral Philosophy in
the Collège de France; that the word _étudiante_ (for Blake had only a
tourist's smattering of French) should literally be translated
_student_, and that the young ladies who bore it as a name were indeed
pursuing rigorous courses of study at the Sorbonne; that it was
obligatory upon a freshman (_nouveau_) in the Quarter to shave his
head and wear wooden shoes for the first month after his
matriculation--from these and kindred superstitions Blake was saved by
his grand talent for never paying attention.

In the meanwhile some of us had read his books: chromo-lithographs,
struck in the primary colours; pasteboard complications of passion and
adventure, with the conservative entanglement of threadbare
marionnettes--a hero, tall, with golden brown moustaches and blue
eyes; a heroine, lissome, with 'sunny locks;' then a swarthy villain,
for the most part a nobleman, and his Spanish-looking female
accomplice, who had an uncomfortable habit of delivering her remarks
'from between clenched teeth,' and, generally, 'in a blood-chilling
hiss'--the narrative set forth in a sustained _fortissimo_, and
punctuated by the timely exits of the god from the machine. Never a
felicity, never an impression. I fancy he had made his notes of human