Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/59

Rh through the door, disappeared almost like a shadow melting into air. He left the hall slowly, like an innocent man, and rushed up the street rapidly like a guilty one. Officers of justice are so singular and obscure in their ways that even when one is acquitted, one flies from them.

As he fled, Ursus mumbled, "I am well out of it. I am the savant untamed; they the savants civilized. Doctors cavil at the learned. False science is the excrement of the true, and is employed to the destruction of philosophers. Philosophers, when they produce sophists, produce their own scourge. Of the dung of the thrush is born the mistletoe, of which is made the birdlime with which the thrush is captured. Turdus sibi malum cacat."

We do not represent Ursus as a refined man. He had the effrontery to use the words which expressed his thoughts. He had no better taste than Voltaire.

When Ursus returned to the Green Box he told Master Nicless that he had been delayed by following a pretty woman, and let not a word escape him concerning his adventure,—except in the evening, when he said in a low voice to Homo: "See here, I have vanquished the three heads of Cerberus."