"You will want hot shaving-water and your best ruffled shirt," urged the
friar.

"I never dance," said the other indifferently.

"And you do well not to," declared Father Baby, with some contemptuous
impatience. "A man who shakes like a load of hay should never dance. If
I had carried your weight, I could have been a holier man."

Dr. Dunlap laughed, and struck his boot with his riding-whip.

"Don't deceive yourself, worthy father. The making of an abbot was not
in you. You old rascal, I am scarcely in the house, and there you stand
all of a tremble for your jig."

Father Baby's death's-head face wrinkled itself with expectant smiles.
He shook off his wooden shoes and whirled upon one toe.

The doctor went into another room, his own apartment in the friar's
small house. His office fronted this, and gave him a door to the street.
Its bottles and jars and iron mortar and the vitreous slab on which he
rolled pills were all lost in twilight now. There were many other
doctors' offices in Kaskaskia, but this was the best equipped one, and
was the lair of a man who had not only been trained in Europe, but had
sailed around the entire world. Dr. Dunlap's books, some of them in
board covers, made a show on his shelves. He had an articulated
skeleton, and ignorant Kaskaskians would declare that they had seen it
whirl past his windows many a night to the music of his violin.

"What did you say had happened since I went away?" he inquired,