this." He hung his head, looked earnestly at the ground: then he
sniffed. Sniffed, do I say? It was as if all the secret rills of the
broad earth had been summoned from their founts. No noise more miserably
watery could have proceeded from a nose. He beamed upon me. "Am I a wet
blanket?" he cried. "Now, friend, shall we go?" He had packed up his
tools in his begging-bag and stood ready to depart. I reminded him that
I had no papers.

"That need not disturb you at all," he said. "You pass in as my convert.
All you have to do is to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. If you
cannot speak you cannot answer; that is good logic, I hope. We will
discuss our several affairs presently in the reasonable air of Tuscany.
I stifle in the Pope's dominions. You might say that there was not room
enough for two such men." He blew out his shining cheeks till his eyes
disappeared; he looked like a swollen tree-bole with a mossy growth
dependent; then he deflated them with a bang, and shouted with laughter
--a single expression of delight, sharply reverberant--and suddenly
stopped. "Poh! what a rattle you'll think me," he said. "Come--and
remember that you are a deaf-mute."

To get a thing granted it is no bad way to take it for granted. This is
what the Capuchin did. I was young and he was old, I undecided and he
perfectly clear in his intention. There was little more--even to my too
charitable eyes--in his favour, certainly not his looks. He was a huge,
straddling, positive kind of a fellow with an air of specious, bluff
benevolence about him which gave way to examination. He had a very ugly
mouth under his beard, cut up sideways by the pressure of his long tooth
to emerge; his eyes were small, greedy and near together; they looked
different ways. His nose was huge and glowing, broad-rooted as a tree
and pitted with the smallpox. On his left brow he had a savage scar. His