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."