All day long on the day of which we speak, and all day long for many days preceding it, there had been a steady flow of folk from the direction of Paris making in the direction of Neuilly, and not a few of these, taken by the appearance of the little wayside Inn, found it agreeable to refresh themselves by slaking their thirst and staying their stomachs inside or outside of its hospitable walls. The most of those that so passed were sight-seers, and these the Inn saw again as they passed homeward in the dusk or sometimes even in the darkness with the aid of flambeaux and lanterns. But a certain number were, as might be said, professional pedestrians, peddlers with their packs upon their shoulders, anxious to dispose of ribbons and trinkets to gaping rustics, easily bubbled burgesses, and to the more wary histrions and mountebanks, for whom a different scale of charges ranged. A little after noon on the day in question the wayside Inn of the Three Graces was quiet enough. The last chance visitor had emptied his can and crossed the bridge to Neuilly and its delights; the last peddler had slung his pack and tramped in the same direction; the gypsies, who since early morning had sprawled upon the common land, had shaken themselves free from their idleness into an assumption of activity, and had marched off almost in a body to take their share in the profits of the occasion by a little judicious horse-coping and fortune-telling. One of their number, indeed, they left behind in the great, gaudy, green-and-red caravan that stood in front of all the other caravans in the middle of the grassy space--one of their number who would much have preferred the merriment and the sunlight of the fair to the confinement of the caravan, but who remained in the caravan, nevertheless, because she had to do what she was told. The neighborhood of the Inn, therefore, seemed strangely deserted when a man appeared upon the bridge in the direction contrary to that of the general stream of passers-by, for this man was coming from the direction of Neuilly and was going in the direction of Paris. He was a twisted man with a hunched back, who was clad in black and carried a long sword, and he came slowly down the slope of the bridge and along the road to the Inn, looking about him quickly and cautiously the while as he did so. He had the air of one resolved to be alert against possible surprises even where surprises were improbable if not impossible; but his sinister face wore a malign smile of self-confidence which proclaimed that its wearer felt himself to be proof against all dangers. XI ÆSOP REDUX