of the walk, the habit that led him by a route where he was familiar
with the least incidents, allowed full liberty to his imaginative
faculties. He invented at these times extraordinary adventures, enough
of them to crank out a score of the serial stories that appear in the
newspapers.

If, for example, M. Joyeuse, as he went up the Faubourg Saint-Honore,
on the right-hand footwalk--he always took that one--noticed a heavy
laundry-cart going along at a quick pace, driven by a woman from the
country with a child perched on a bundle of linen and leaning over
somewhat:

"The child!" the terrified old fellow would cry. "Have a care of the
child!"

His voice would be lost in the noise of the wheels and his warning among
the secrets of Providence. The cart passed. He would follow it for a
moment with his eye, then resume his walk; but the drama begun in
his mind would continue to unfold itself there, with a thousand
catastrophes. The child had fallen. The wheels were about to pass over
him. M. Joyeuse dashed forward, saved the little creature on the very
brink of destruction; the pole of the cart, however, struck himself
full in the chest and he fell bathed in blood. Then he would see himself
borne to some chemists' shop through the crowd that had collected. He
was placed in an ambulance, carried to his own house, and then suddenly
he would hear the piercing cry of his daughters, his well-beloved
daughters, when they beheld him in this condition. And that agonized
cry touched his heart so deeply, he would hear it so distinctly, so
realistically: "Papa, my dear papa," that he would himself utter it
aloud in the street, to the great astonishment of the passers-by, in a