delicate fingers from? Already he can pass a coin from back to front----"
he flicked an illustrative conjuror's hand--"at eight years old. To teach
him was as easy as falling off a log. Still, that's mechanical. What I want
to know is, where did he get his power of mimicry? That artistic sense of
expressing personality? 'Pon my soul, he's damn well nearly as clever as
Billy."

During the talk which followed the discovery of our former meeting, I
reported to Colonel Lackaday these encomiums of years ago. He smiled
wistfully.

"Most of the dear old fellow's swans were geese, I'm afraid," said he. "And
I was the awkwardest gosling of them all. They tried for years to teach me
the acrobat's business; but it was no good. They might just as well have
spent their pains on a rheumatic young giraffe."

I looked at him and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I asked
myself, could the man into which he had developed, ever have become an
acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six
foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around
which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human
limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above
the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated
as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have
expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the
sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most
delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous
fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died
without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. In a word,
the fingers of the artiste manque. I have told you what Ben Flint, shrewd