In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be _banal_ M. Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments in morocco, russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens with which, for the love of the thing itself, he had amused his leisure hours and which he should be happy to show his interlocutor if the latter would do him the honour to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr. Vetch made a note of the address and, for the love of the thing itself, went one Sunday afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this occasion he made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady with a bristling moustache, the white cap of an _ouvrière_, a knowledge of her husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable of English save the words “What you think, what you think?” which she introduced with indefatigable frequency. He also discovered that his new acquaintance had been a political proscript and that he regarded the iniquitous fabric of Church and State with an eye scarcely more reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was an aggressive socialist, which Anastasius Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of being a mere scoffer at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist and a collectivist and a perfectionist and a visionary; he believed the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks and cover the globe with boulevards, radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit in groups at little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee (not tea, _par exemple!_) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr. Vetch neither prefigured nor desired this organised beatitude; he was fond of his cup of tea and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal simplified; he thought it a much overrated system, but his heresies rubbed shoulders sociably with those of the little bookbinder, and his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelligent foreigner whose conversation gives wings to our heavy-footed culture. Poupin’s humanitary zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to discuss, which was much better than an unspeakable harmony. On several other Sunday afternoons the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they didn’t understand a word that was spoken and consoled themselves by hanging on the agitated fiddlestick of their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure failed to arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies,