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k up your own grain without coming to mine."
"And so I can, and so I will, uncle," replied our friend Martin Grille, pausing at the entrance of the booth to look at himself from head to foot, in evident admiration of his own appearance. "Did you ever see any thing fit better? Upon my life, it is a perfect marvel that any man should ever have been made so perfectly like me as to have worn these clothes before, without the slightest alteration! Nobody would believe it."
"Nobody will believe they are your own, Cousin Martin," said the deformed boy, with a grin.
"Ah," said Caboche, dryly, "men always gave you credit for more ingenuity than you possess, and they will in this instance also. I always said you were a good-humored, foolish, hair-brained lad, without wit enough to take a bird's nest or bamboozle a goose; but people would not believe me, even when you were clad in hodden gray. What will they think now, when you dance about in silk and broadcloth?"
"Why they'll think, good uncle, that I have all the wit they imagined, and all the honesty you knew me to have. But I'll tell you all about it, that my own relations, at least, may have cause to glorify themselves."
"Get you gone--get you gone," cried the cutler, in a rough, but not ill-humored tone. "I don't want to know how you got the clothes."
"Tell me, Martin, tell me," said the boy; "I should like to hear, of all things. Perhaps I may get some in the same way, some day."
"Mayhap," answered Martin Grille, seating himself on a bench, and kindly putting his arm round the deformed boy's neck. "Well, you must know, Petit Jean, that there is a certain Signor Lomelini, who is ma?tre d'h?tel to his highness the Duke of Orleans--"
"Big Caboche growled out a curse between his teeth; for while pretending to occupy himself with other things, he was listening to the tale all the time, and the Duke of Orleans was with him an object of that strange, fanciful, prejudiced hatred, which men of inferior station very often conceive, without the slightest cause, against persons placed above them.
"Well, this Signor Lomelini--"
"There, there," cried Caboche; "we know all about that long ago. How his mule put its foot into a hole in the street, and tumbled him head over heels into the gutter, and you picked him out, and scraped, and wiped him, and took him back clean and sound, though desperately frightened, and a little bruised. We recollect all about that, and what gay day-dreams you built up, and thought your fortune made. Has he recollected you at last, and given you a cast off suit of clothes? He has been somewhat tardy in his gratitude, and niggardly, too."
"All wrong, uncle mine, all wrong!" replied Martin Grille, laughing. "There has been hardly a day on which I have not seen him since, and when I hav'n't dined with you, I have dined at the H?tel d'Orleans. He found out what you never found out: that I was dexterous, serviceable, and discreet, and many has been the little job which required dispatch and secrecy which I have done for him."
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