Macallummore. You have eight barons' courts--Reculver, Baston,

Hell-Kerters, Homble, Moricambe, Grundraith, Trenwardraith, and others.

You have a right over the turf-cutting of Pillinmore, and over the

alabaster quarries near Trent. Moreover, you own all the country of

Penneth Chase; and you have a mountain with an ancient town on it. The

town is called Vinecaunton; the mountain is called Moilenlli. All which

gives you an income of forty thousand pounds a year. That is to say,

forty times the five-and-twenty thousand francs with which a Frenchman

is satisfied."

Whilst Barkilphedro spoke, Gwynplaine, in a crescendo of stupor,

remembered the past. Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest

depths. Gwynplaine knew all the words pronounced by Barkilphedro. They

were written in the last lines of the two scrolls which lined the van in

which his childhood had been passed, and, from so often letting his eyes

wander over them mechanically, he knew them by heart. On reaching, a

forsaken orphan, the travelling caravan at Weymouth, he had found the

inventory of the inheritance which awaited him; and in the morning, when

the poor little boy awoke, the first thing spelt by his careless and

unconscious eyes was his own title and its possessions. It was a strange

detail added to all his other surprises, that, during fifteen years,

rolling from highway to highway, the clown of a travelling theatre,

earning his bread day by day, picking up farthings, and living on

crumbs, he should have travelled with the inventory of his fortune

placarded over his misery.

Barkilphedro touched the casket on the table with his forefinger.

663

The Man Who Laughs