"Lord Almighty," said he, with a gasp. "Lord Almighty!" He stared for a long time in front of him without speaking. Then to my amazement he said deliberately: "I remember you! You were a sort of a young English god in a straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take me for rides on the clown's pig. The clown was my foster father. And now I'm commanding a battalion in the British Army. By Gum! It's a damn funny world!" Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy. "'By Gum!'" I repeated. "Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint used to say twenty times an hour!" It was a shibboleth proving his story true. And I remembered the weedy, ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that circus crowd. Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to go round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mlle Renée Saint-Maur or her lesser sister luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically styled "Auguste" in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow held the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a man of remarkable cultivation; save for a lapse here and there into North Country idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country burr, his English was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke excellent French, although in the ring he had to follow the classical tradition of the English clown, and pronounce his patter with a nerve-rasping Britannic accent. He never told me his history. But there he was, the principal clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be, with every bit of his business at his fingers' ends, in a great and important circus. Like most of his colleagues, he knew the wide world from Tokio to Christiania; but, unlike the rest of the crowd, whose life seemed to be bounded by the canvas walls of the circus, and who differentiated their impressions of Singapore and Moscow mainly in terms of climate and alcohol, Ben Flint had observed men and things and had recorded and analysed his experiences, so that, meeting a more or less educated youth like myself--perhaps a rare bird in the circus world--standing on the brink of life, thirsting for the knowledge that is not supplied by lectures at the Universities, he must have felt some kind of satisfaction in pouring out, for my benefit, the full vintage of his wisdom.