It was a singular figure, that of the dealer: an immense cranium, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a meagre aureole of white hair that brought out all the more vividly the clear salmon tint of the skin, gave him a false air of patriarchal simplicity--contradicted, on the other hand, by the sparkling of two little yellow eyes, which trembled in their orbits like two _louis d’ors_ on a surface of quicksilver. The curve of the nose presented an aquiline silhouette which recalled the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands--thin, bony, veined, full of sinews stretched like the strings on the neck of a violin, and armed with talons resembling those which terminate the membranous wings of a bat--shook with a senile movement disquieting to see. But those feverishly nail-bitten hands became firmer than lobster-claws or steel pincers when they lifted some precious piece--an onyx carving, a Venetian cup, or a plate of Bohemian crystal. This old rascal had an aspect so profoundly rabbinical and cabalistic that three centuries ago they would have burned him merely from the evidence of his face. “Will you not buy something from me to-day, Monsieur? Here is a Malay kris with a blade undulating like a flame: see those grooves to serve as gutters for the blood, those teeth fashioned and set inversely so as to rip out the entrails when the dagger is withdrawn. It is a fine type of ferocious weapon, and would look very well among your trophies. This two-handed sword is very beautiful--it is a José de la Hera; and this _colichemarde_ with perforated guard, what a superb piece of work!” “No, I have plenty of arms and instruments of carnage. I want a figurine, something that would do for a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those stock bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found on any desk.” The old gnome, foraging among his antiquities, finally arranged before me several antique bronzes--so called, at least; fragments of malachite; little Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah toys made of jade, showing the incarnation of Brahma or of Vishnu, marvellously well-suited for the sufficiently ungodlike purpose of holding papers and letters in place. I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon all starred with warts, its jaws adorned with tusks and bristling whiskers, and a highly abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god Vitziliputzili _au naturel_, when I noticed a charming foot which I at first took for a fragment of an antique Venus. It had those beautiful tawny and ruddy tints which give to Florentine bronze that warm and vivacious look so preferable to the grayish green tone of ordinary bronze, which might be taken for statues in putrefaction. Satiny lights frisked over its form, rounded and polished by the loving kisses of twenty centuries; for it seemed to be a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era, perhaps a casting by Lysippus!