One day a mysterious stranger arrives at a boardinghouse of the widow Gateau--a sad-faced stranger who keeps to himself. When the widow s daughter Mirette discovers him crossing the courtyard on air she begs him to teach her how he does it. But Mirette doesn t know that the stranger was once the Great Bellini--master wire-walker. Or that Bellini has been stopped by a terrible fear. And it is she who must teach him courage once again. Emily Arnold McCully s sweeping watercolor paintings carry the reader over the rooftops of nineteenth-century Paris and into an elegant beautiful world of acrobats jugglers mimes actors and one gallant resourceful little girl.