Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/204

 Congo savageries had made him enormously rich, the beggar because he wouldn't know the richest man from a mere million-pauper, like me."

D'Ostoya's cartoon represented Leopold in monk's habit, undergoing one of the several temptations immortalized by Flaubert's great novel. But it wasn't the Queen of Sheba who called—rather Mrs. Fat-and-Forty minus furbelows and things. No wonder Leopold, being artistically inclined, looks annoyed.

"Watch the virtuous indignation oozing out of the old rascal," said Mark. "The editor of the 'Ladies' Home Journal,' asked to do an essay on bruisers for the 'Police Gazette,' couldn't be shocked any harder."

When I told him about an article on Leopold I had done for the "New York World," which caused a Montreal editor, who stole it, to be jugged for libel ("Six months," said the judge of literature), Mark grew enthusiastic.

"Was that yours?" he cried. "Good boy! Come along and I will buy you dinner at one of those places where they are ashamed to put the price of dishes à la carte because they hate to confess that they charge less than 1,000 francs a pea." 200