a street meeting. What two-legged or four-legged hum of voices did he not mimic to perfection, as long as he had before him an audience well equipped with those "muscles of mirth" invented by our talented authoress Albertina Bertha?
On other occasions he reverted to prehistoric times. When his hearers were not over ignorant, drawing upon his own modicum of learning, he would reconstruct for their intellectual delectation the paleontological roars of extant brutes, love-growls of mammoths to their mates or the yells of the stegosaurus upon seeing hairy homos perched upon tree-ferns, according to the laughable descriptive science of Barros Barreto.
If he ran across a group of friends talking on a street corner, he would come quietly up to them and slap the calf of the nearest leg. It was funny to see the frightened jump and hear the nervous "Get out!" of the unsuspecting victim, followed by the hilarious laughter of the others and also of Pontes who had his own mode of laughter, boisterous and musical—music after Offenbach. Pontes' laugh was an imitation of the natural and spontaneous laughter of the human species, the only one that laughs, with exception of the drunken fox,—and passed abruptly without transition into a seriousness irresistibly comic.
In all his gestures and manner, in his way of walking, reading, eating; in the most trivial details of life, this man possessed of the devil, differed from the others in that he made prodigious fun of everything.
This reached such a point that it was only
