He smoked silently in his wicker chair, giving me time to realise the sudden change in my fortunes. Then only did I understand. I saw myself for a desolate moment, cast motherless, rudderless on the wide world where art and scholarship met with contumely and undergrown youth was buffeted and despised. My gorgeous dreams were at an end. The blighting commonplace overspread my soul. "What would you like to do, my little Asticot?" he asked. I pulled myself together and looked at him heroically. "I could be a butcher's boy." The corners of my mouth twitched. It was a shuddersome avocation, and the prospect of the companionship of other butcher boys who could not draw, did not know French, and had never heard of Joanna filled me with a horrible sense of doom. Suddenly Paragot leaped up in his wild way to his feet and clapped me so heartily on the shoulder that I staggered. "My son," cried he, "I have an inspiration. It is spring, and the hedgerows are greener than the pavement, and the high roads of Europe are wider than Tavistock Street. We will seek them to-day, Asticot _de mon coeur_; I'll be Don Quixote and you'll be my Sancho, and we'll go again in quest of adventures." He laughed aloud, and shook me like a little rat. "_Cela te tape dans l'oeil, mon petit Asticot?_" Without waiting for me to reply, he rushed to the ricketty washstand, poured out water from the broken ewer, and after washing, began to dress in feverish haste, talking all the time. Used as I was to his suddenness my wits could not move fast enough to follow him. "Then I needn't be a butcher's boy?" I said at last. He paused in the act of drawing on a boot. "Butcher's boy? Do you want to be a butcher's boy?" "No, Master," said I fervently. "Then what are you talking of?" He had evidently not heard my answer to his question. "I am going to educate you in the High School of the Earth, the University of the Universe, and to-morrow you shall see a cow and a dandelion. And before then you will be disastrously seasick." "The sea!" I cried in delirious amazement. "We are going on the sea? Where are we going?" "To France, _petit imbécile_," he cried. "Why are you not getting ready to go there?" I might have answered that I had no personal preparations to make; but feeling rebuked for idleness while he was so busy, I began to clear away the breakfast things. He stopped me. "_Nom de Dieu_, we are not going to travel with cups and saucers!" He dragged from the top of the cupboard an incredibly dirty carpet bag of huge dimensions and decayed antiquity, and bade me pack therein our belongings. The process was not a lengthy one; we had so few. When we had little more than half filled the bag with articles of attire and the toilette stuffed in pell-mell, we looked around for ballast. "The books, Master," said I.