nts
in an argot which could only be followed by instinct. A great narrator,
he would describe at length life in the town of Nancy, where, when the
War broke out, he was driving a market cart, and distributing
vegetables, which had made him an authority on municipal reform. Though
an incorrigible joker, his stockfish countenance would remain perfectly
grave, except for an occasional hoarse chuckle. You would have thought
he had no more power of compassion than a cat, no more sensibility than
a Chinese idol; but this was not so. In his wooden, shrewd, distrustful
way he responded to sympathy, and was even sorry for others. I used to
like very much his attitude to the young "stable-companion" who had
arrived with him; he had no contempt, such as he might easily have felt
for so weakly a creature, but rather a real indulgence towards his
feebleness. "Ah!" he would say at first; "he won't make old bones--that
one!" But he seemed extremely pleased when, in a fortnight or so, he had
to modify that view, for Bidan (Prosper) prospered more rapidly even
than himself. That grey look was out of the boy's face within three
weeks. It was wonderful to watch him come back to life, till at last he
could say, with his dreadful Provencal twang, that he felt "_tres
biang_." A most amiable youth, he had been a cook, and his chief
ambition was to travel till he had attained the summit of mortal hopes,
and was cooking at the Ritz in London. When he came to us his limbs
seemed almost to have lost their joints, they wambled so. He had no
muscle at all. Utter anaemia had hold of all his body, and all but a
corner of his French spirit. Round that unquenchable gleam of gaiety the
rest of him slowly rallied. With proper food and air and freedom, he
began to have a faint pink flush in his china-white cheeks; his lids no
longer drooped, his limbs seemed to regain their joints, his hands
ceased to swell, he complained less and less of the pains about his
heart. When, of a morning, he was finished with, and "_le grand-pere_"
was having his hands done, they would engage in lively repartee--oblivious
of one's presence. We began to feel that this grey ghost of a youth had
been well named, after all, when they called him Prosper, so lyrical
would he wax over the constitution and cooking of "_bouillabaisse_,"
over the South, and the buildings of his native Aix-en-Provence. In all
France you could not have found a greater contrast than those two who had
come