Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/152

 to ask the great Slap-bang? What if the latter took him for a madman, and showed him to the door?

"Where do you live?" demanded Slap-bang.

"Oh! close by. The Rue des Abbesses!"

"Come!" said the other; "the little fellow wants to see Slap-bang—well, he shall see him."

the door opened before the clown, Jacques cried out joyfully, "Cheer up, Francis! Here is Slap-bang."

The child's face beamed with expectation. He raised himself upon his mother's arm, and turned his head towards the two men as they entered. Who was the gentleman in an overcoat beside his father, who smiled good-naturedly, but whom he did not know? "Slap-bang," they told him. It was all in vain. His head fell slowly back upon the pillow, and his great sad blue eyes seemed to look out again beyond the narrow chamber walls, in search, unceasing search, of the spangles and the butterfly of the Slap-bang of his dreams.

"No," he said, in a voice which sounded inconsolable; "no; this is not Slap-bang!'

The clown, standing by the little bed, looked gravely down upon the child with a regard of infinite kind-heartedness. He shook his head, and looking at the anxious father and the mother in her agony, said smiling, "He is right. This is not Slap-bang." And he left the room.

"I shall not see him; I shall never see him again," said the child, softly.

But all at once—half an hour had not elapsed since the clown had disappeared—the door was sharply opened, and behold, in his black spangled tunic, the yellow tuft upon his head, the golden butterfly upon his breast and back, a large smile opening his mouth like a money-box, his face white with flour, Slap-bang, the true Slap-bang, the Slap-bang of the circus, burst into view. And in his little white cot, with the joy of life in his eyes, laughing, crying, happy, saved, the little fellow clapped his feeble hands, and, with the recovered gaiety of seven years old, cried out:

"Bravo! Bravo, Slap-bang! It is he this time! This is Slap-bang! Long live Slap-bang! Bravo!"

the doctor called that day, he found, sitting beside the little patient's pillow, a white-faced clown, who kept him in a constant ripple of laughter, and who was observing, as he stirred a lump of sugar at the bottom of a glass of cooling drink:

"You know, Francis, if you do not drink your medicine, you will never see Slap-bang again."

And the child drank up the draught.

"Is it not good?"