The professor was a small man, and not talkative. He was, if anything,
inclined to be silently moody, for luck was against him. He put his
baggage in the small bedroom that Mrs. Muldoon allotted to him, and much
of the time he spent in New York. He had fellow countrymen there, and he
was trying to raise a loan, with which to buy a canvas booth in which to
show his educated insects. He received the friendly advances of Flannery
and the other boarders rather coldly. He refused to discuss his
specialty, or show Mike the toe of the left hind foot of a flea through
a telescope. When he remained at home after dinner he did not sit with
the other boarders on the porch, but walked up and down the walk,
smoking innumerable cigarettes, and thinking, and waving his hands in
mute conversations with himself.
"I dunno what ails th' professor," said Mrs. Muldoon, one evening when
she and Flannery sat at the table after the rest had left it.
Flannery hesitated.
"I would not like to say for sure, mam," he said, slowly, "but I'm
thinkin' 't is a loss he has had, maybe, that's preyin' on his mind.
Ever since ye told me, Missus Muldoon, that he was a professor of th'
educated fleas, I have had doubts of th' state of th' mind of th'
professor.
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