Chapter II

We passed through into a private workroom immediately behind the shop. His wife sat there sewing; a broad, motherly woman of forty-five, fat, tranquil, kind, with an old eye, a young voice, and a face that had got its general flabbiness through much paddling and gnawing from other women's teething babes. She sat still, unintroduced, but welcomed me with a smile.

I was saying to her husband that a hummingbird was a very small thing to ask him to stuff. But he stopped me with his lifted palm.

"My fran', a hummingbird has de pas-sione'--de ecstacie! One drop of blood wid the pas-sione in it"--He waved his hand with a jerk of the thumb in disdain of spoken words, and it was I who added,

"Is bigger than the sun?"

"Hah!" was all he uttered in approval, turning as if to go to work. I feared I had disappointed him.

"God measures by the soul, not by the size," I suggested. But he would say no more, and his wife put in as softly as a kettle beginning to sing,

"Ah, ha, ha! I t'ink dass where de good God show varrie good sanse."

I began looking here and there in heartiest admiration of the products of his art and presently we were again in full sympathy and talking eagerly. As I was going he touched my arm:

"You will say de soul is parted from dat lill' bird. And--yass; but"--he let a gesture speak the rest.

"I know," replied I; "you propose to make the soul seem to come back and leave us its portrait. I believe you will." Whereupon he gave me his first, faint smile, and detained me with another touch.

"Msieu Smeet; when you was bawn?"

"I? December 9, 1844. Why do you ask?"

"O nut'n'; only I thing you make me luck; nine, h-eighteen, fawty-fo'--I play me doze number' in de lott'ree to-day."

"Why, pshaw! you don't play the lottery, do you?"

"Yass. I play her; why not? She make me reech some of doze day'. Win fifty dollah one time las' year."

The soft voice of the wife spoke up--"And spend it all to the wife of my dead brother. What use him be reech? I think he don't stoff bird' no betteh."

But the husband responded more than half to himself,

"Yass, I think mebbe I stoff him lill' more betteh."

When, some days afterward I called again, thinking as I drew near how much fineness of soul and life, seen or unseen, must have existed in earlier generations to have produced this man, I noticed the in conspicuous sign over his door, P.T.B. Manouvrier, and as he led me at once into the back room I asked him playfully what such princely abundance of initials might stand for.

"Doze? Ah, doze make only Pas-Trop-Bon."

I appealed to his wife; but she, with her placid laugh, would only confirm him:

"Yass; Pastropbon; he like that name. Tha's all de way I call him-- Pastropbon."