man born.

Before going on to look after my Legacy we were to make one regular day
in Paris, and I leave you to judge my dear what a day _that_ was with
Jemmy and the Major and the telescope and me and the prowling young man
at the inn door (but very civil too) that went along with us to show the
sights. All along the railway to Paris Jemmy and the Major had been
frightening me to death by stooping down on the platforms at stations to
inspect the engines underneath their mechanical stomachs, and by creeping
in and out I don't know where all, to find improvements for the United
Grand Junction Parlour, but when we got out into the brilliant streets on
a bright morning they gave up all their London improvements as a bad job
and gave their minds to Paris. Says the prowling young man to me "Will I
speak Inglis No?" So I says "If you can young man I shall take it as a
favour," but after half-an-hour of it when I fully believed the man had
gone mad and me too I says "Be so good as fall back on your French sir,"
knowing that then I shouldn't have the agonies of trying to understand
him, which was a happy release. Not that I lost much more than the rest
either, for I generally noticed that when he had described something very
long indeed and I says to Jemmy "What does he say Jemmy?" Jemmy says
looking with vengeance in his eye "He is so jolly indistinct!" and that
when he had described it longer all over again and I says to Jemmy "Well
Jemmy what's it all about?" Jemmy says "He says the building was repaired
in seventeen hundred and four, Gran."

Wherever that prowling young man formed his prowling habits I cannot be
expected to know, but the way in which he went round the corner while we
had our breakfasts and was there again when we swallowed the last crumb
was most marvellous, and just the same at dinner and at night, prowling
equally at the theatre and the inn gateway and the shop doors when we
bought a trifle or two and everywhere else but troubled with a tendency
to spit. And of Paris I can tell you no more my dear than that it's town
and country both in one, and carved stone and long streets of high houses
and gardens and fountains and statues and trees and gold, and immensely
big soldiers and immensely little soldiers and the pleasantest nurses
with the whitest caps a playing at skipping-rope with the bunchiest
babies in the flattest caps, and clean table-cloths spread everywhere for
dinner and people sitting out o