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Rh asking the question as if his very life depended on the answer: "Yes, it is good," we tell him reassuringly.

"Ah-h-h. Ah-h."

He is once more superlatively happy. It is good, le fromage. Could anything be more superbly amazing? After perhaps a minute

"monsieur—monsieur—c'est chère le fromage?"

"Very," we tell him truthfully. He smiles, blissfully astonished. Then, with extreme delicacy and the utmost timidity conceivable

"monsieur, combien ça coute, monsieur?"

We tell him. He totters with astonishment and happiness. Only now, as if we had just conceived the idea, we say carelessly

"en voulez-vous?"

He straightens, thrilled from the top of his rather beautiful filthy head to the soleless slippers with which he promenades in rain and frost:

"Merci, Monsieur!"

We cut him a piece. He takes it quiveringly, holds it a second as a king might hold and contemplate the best and biggest jewel of his realm, turns with profuse thanks to us—and disappears....

He is perhaps most curious of this pleasantly sounding thing which everyone around him, everyone who curses and spits upon and bullies him, desires with a terrible desire—Liberté. Whenever anyone departs Surplice is in an ecstasy of quiet excitement. The lucky man may be Fritz; for whom Bathhouse John is taking up a collection as if he, Fritz, were a Hollander and not a Dane—for whom Bathhouse John is striding hither and thither, shaking a hat into which we drop coins for Fritz; Bathhouse John, chipmunk-cheeked, who talks Belgian, French, English and Dutch in his dreams, who has been two years in La Ferté (and they say he declined to leave, once, when given the chance), who cries "baigneur de femmes moi" and every night hoists himself into his wooden bunk