Gideon had grown to be to vaudeville much what Uncle Remus is to literature:  there was virtue in his very simplicity.  His artistry itself was native and natural.  He loved a good story, and he told it from his own sense of the gleeful morsel upon his tongue as no training could have made him.  He always enjoyed his story and himself in the telling.  Tales never lost their savor, no matter how often repeated; age was powerless to dim the humor of the thing, and as he had shouted and gurgled and laughed over the fun of things when all alone, or holding forth among the men and women and little children of his color, so he shouted and gurgled and broke from sonorous chuckles to musical, falsetto mirth when he fronted the sweeping tiers of faces across the intoxicating glare of the footlights.  He had that rare power of transmitting something of his own enjoyments.  When Gideon was on the stage, Stuhk used to enjoy peeping out at the intent, smiling faces of the audience, where men and women and children, hardened theater-goers and folk fresh from the country, sat with moving lips and faces lit with an eager interest and sympathy for the black man strutting in loose-footed vivacity before them.

“He’s simply unique,” he boasted to wondering local managers—­“unique, and it took me to find him.  There he was, a little black gold-mine, and all of ’em passed him by until I came.  Some eye?  What?  I guess you’ll admit you have to hand it some to your Uncle Felix.  If that coon’s health holds out, we’ll have all the money there is in the mint.”

That was Felix’s real anxiety—­“If his health holds out.”  Gideon’s health was watched over as if he had been an ailing prince.  His bubbling vivacity was the foundation upon which his charm and his success were built.  Stuhk became a sort of vicarious neurotic, eternally searching for symptoms in his protege; Gideon’s tongue, Gideon’s liver, Gideon’s heart were matters to him of an unfailing and anxious interest.  And of late—­of course it might be imagination —­Gideon had shown a little physical falling off.  He ate a bit less, he had begun to move in a restless way, and, worst of all, he laughed less frequently.

As a matter of fact, there was ground for Stuhk’s apprehension.  It was not all a matter of managerial imagination:  Gideon was less himself.  Physically there was nothing the matter with him; he could have passed his rigid insurance scrutiny as easily as he had done months before, when his life and health had been insured for a sum that made good copy for his press-agent.  He was sound in every organ, but there was something lacking in general tone.  Gideon felt it himself, and was certain that a “misery,” that embracing indisposition of his race, was creeping upon him.  He had been fed well, too well; he was growing rich, too rich; he had all the praise, all the flattery that his enormous appetite for approval desired, and too much of it.  White men sought