Which in its way was still truer. "Ah," he answered carelessly, "the Italian! I have heard of him. What sort of a fellow was he?" I explained enthusiastically, but as usual quite in vain. "Well," said the man, cursing the smoke and beginning to move off, "he might as well have stopped at home for all the good he did. That's my way of it!" And I will not conceal from the reader that this summed up pretty fairly the bulk of French opinion upon the great leader. As may well be imagined I stood far back, shrouded in shadow and smoke till Keller Bey had finished his speech. He told how in Paris the revolt of the proletariat had been completely successful, how the army had gone over to the cause of the people, how the bourgeois Government had fled to Versailles with hardly one to do them honour--how in all the great cities of France the new Commune was being declared and established. At Marseilles Gambetta's young Procureur-General, the citizen Gaston Cremieux, headed the movement. He read a dispatch that moment received, urging Aramon to send a thousand men to help their brothers in Marseilles, threatened with troops from overseas and exposed to daily attacks from the still untaken forts. "We shall be glad to aid our brothers in Marseilles if we are let alone here. We desire no fighting. The troops of the tricolour are not within our gates, and though there are some left who think differently from us, we can, I believe, live on excellent terms with them, until our Government is solidified and the Company of Arms is ready to nationalise its works. Till that day we must deal prudently, rule well, allow no attempts on private property, and behave as if we were all in reality as well as in name comrades and brothers." So far as I could judge, I think Keller Bey carried the audience with him. I did not hear a murmur of dissent. Only, on the other hand, the plaudits could not be called long-continued or well-nourished. The workers of Aramon-les-Ateliers cherished a secret doubt--a doubt which they wished set at rest. "What of Dennis?" they cried. "Dennis Deventer? Are the works to be closed? Where is the week's wage to come from?" Keller Bey rose again, brushing aside the Pere Felix.