"'Oh, be careful! You may fall—may die,' said my mother.
"'You have said that, Madame, which would send me smiling on a worse errand. Since I was of this lad's bigness, no one has so much as cared if I lived or died. I was a mere dog of the streets whom all men kicked.'
"'Poor fellow,' said my mother. 'We are alike of the company of misfortune, and perhaps from this day you may forever turn from evil.'
"'Let us waste no more time,' said the Duke; 'but have a care, or we shall lose you.'
"'If he had a long string which he might unroll,' said I. 'I saw that in a book.'
"'Good,' said the Duke, 'if we had it; but we have not.'
"'But we have,' said the thief. 'Here is Madame's knitting-ball. The lad shall hold the end, and I shall be the fish at the other end, and unroll it as I go.'
"Upon this, I, very proud, was given the end to hold, and our thief took his lantern and went on, we watching him until the light was lost because of his turning a corner. He might have been gone half an hour when he came back. My mother said to him: 'We feared for you. And now, what is your name? For if out of jest we have called you Mr. Thief, that is not to be done any more.'
"Upon this he said his name was François, and that in the catacombs he had gotten into a labyrinth of wet passages and seen no light anywhere. 'Indeed,' he said, 'if we venture in and lose power to come back whither we started, we may never get out alive. What with the bewilderment of many crossings, underground ways, and the armies of rats, it is a mad resort.' This notion of the rats, I confess, made me quail. So the end of it was that our new hope became but a new despair. Mon Dieu! 'T is a long tale."
Both Pierce and I declared our interest, which was in truth real, and he went on.