costume was hidden by the crowd pressing round him; but though he did not appear to be more than thirty-five, he was bald, showing only a few sparse locks at the temples and they already gray. The broad high forehead was furrowed, but in the deep-set eyes there glowed an extraordinary youthfulness, a fervid vitality, a consuming passion. Those eyes never moved from the gipsy, and the longer the girl danced and bounded in all the unrestrained grace of her sixteen years, delighting the populace, the gloomier did his thoughts seem to become. Ever and anon a smile and a sigh would meet upon his lips, but the smile was the more grievous of the two.

At last, out of breath with her exertion, the girl stopped, and the people applauded with all their heart.

“Djali!” cried the gipsy.

At this there appeared a pretty little white goat, lively, intelligent, and glossy, with gilded horns and hoofs and a gilt collar, which Gringoire had not observed before, as it had been lying on a corner of the carpet, watching its mistress dance.

“Djali,” said the dancing girl, “it is your turn now,” and seating herself, she gracefully held out her tambourine to the goat.

“Now, Djali,” she continued, “which month of the year is it?”

The goat lifted its fore-foot and tapped once on the tambourine. It was in fact the first month. The crowd applauded.

“Djali,” resumed the girl, reversing the tambourine, “what day of the month is it?”

Djali lifted her little golden hoof and gave six strokes on the tambourine.

“Djali,” continued the gipsy girl, again changing the position of the tambourine, “what hour of the day is it?”

Djali gave seven strokes. At the same instant the clock of the Maison-aux-Piliers struck seven.

The people were lost in admiration and astonishment.

“There is witchcraft in this,” said a sinister voice in the crowd. It came from the bald man, who had never taken his eyes off the gipsy.

The girl shuddered and turned round, but the applause burst out afresh and drowned the morose exclamation— effaced it, indeed, so completely from her mind that she continued to interrogate her goat.

“Djali, show us how Maître Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the town sharp-shooters, walks in the procession at Candlemas.”

Djali stood up on her hind legs and began to bleat, while she strutted along with such a delightful air of gravity that the whole circle of spectators, irresistibly carried away by this parody on the devotional manner of the captain of the sharp-shooters, burst into a roar of laughter.

“Djali,” resumed the girl, emboldened by her increasing success, “show us Maître Jacques Charmolue, the King’s Procurator in the Ecclesiastical Court, when he preaches.”

The goat sat up on its hind quarters and proceeded to bleat and wave its fore-feet in so comical a fashion that— excepting the bad French and worse Latin—it was Jacques Charmolue, gesture, accent, attitude, to the life.

The crowd applauded ecstatically.