deliberately: "I remember you! You were a sort of a young English god in a
straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take me for rides on the
clown's pig. The clown was my foster father. And now I'm commanding a
battalion in the British Army. By Gum! It's a damn funny world!"

Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy.

"'By Gum!'" I repeated. "Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint used to
say twenty times an hour!"

It was a shibboleth proving his story true. And I remembered the weedy,
ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that
circus crowd.

Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to go
round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I
assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mlle Renee Saint-Maur or her
lesser sister luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically styled
"Auguste" in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow held
the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a man of
remarkable cultivation; save for a lapse here and there into North Country
idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country burr, his English
was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke excellent French,
although in the ring he had to follow the classical tradition of the
English clown, and pronounce his patter with a nerve-rasping Britannic
accent. He never told me his history. But there he was, the principal
clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be, with every bit of his
business at his fingers' ends, in a great and important circus. Like most
of his colleagues, he knew the wide world from Tokio to Christiania; but,
unlike the rest of the crowd, whose life seemed to be bounded by the canvas