[Illustration:  A little visitor.]

Joliet set her incontinently on horseback, and walked by her side to a good village cure’s two miles off—­the same who had assisted him to his first communion, and for whom he subsequently became a beadle.  The kind priest opened his arms to the man, his heart to the woman, his stable to the horse.  For his second patient my Bohemian set in motion all his stock of curative ideas.  In a month she was well, and the cure no longer had three pensioners, for of two of them he made one.

Two poverties added may make a competence.  Monsieur and Madame Joliet were good and willing.  The man began to wear a strange not unbecoming air of solidity and good morals.  The girls now saluted him respectfully when he passed through a village.

One thing, however, in the midst of his proud honeymoon perplexed him much.  Hardly married, and over head and ears in love, he knew not how to invite his bride to some wretched garret, himself deserting her to resume his former life in the open air.  To give up the latter seemed like losing existence itself.

One morning, as he asked himself the difficult question, a pair of old wheels at the door of a cartwright seemed of their own accord to resolve his perplexity.  He bought them, the payment to be made in labor:  for a week he blew the wheelwright’s bellows.  The wheels were his own:  to make a wagon was now the affair of a few old boards and a gypsy’s inventiveness.

Thus was conceived that famous establishment where, for several years, lived the independent monarch and his spouse, rolling over the roads, circulating through the whole belt of villages around Paris, and carrying in their ambulant home, like the Cossacks, their utensils, their bed, their oven, their all.

From town to town they carried packages, boxes and articles of barter.  At dinner-time the van was rolled under a tree.  The lady of the house kindled a fire in the portable stove behind a hedge or in a ditch.  The hen-coop was opened, and the sage seraglio with their sultan prudently pecked about for food.  At the first appeal they re-entered their cage.

[Illustration:  Francine.]

At the same appeal came flying up the dog of the establishment, a most piteous-looking griffin, disheveled, moulted, staring out of one eye, lame and wild.  For devotion and good sense his match could be found nowhere.  Like his horse, his wife, his house and the pins in his sleeve, Joliet had picked the collie up on the road.

The arrival of a tiny visitor to the Bohemian’s address made a change necessary.  Little Francine’s dowry was provided by my humorous acquisition of the yellow and slate-colored chickens.

With his savings and my banknote Joliet determined to have a fixed residence.  He succeeded of course.  The walls, the windows, the doors, everything but the garden-patch, he picked up along the roads.