he
had allowed himself and his thirty men to be taken by us had something
to do with this decision.

The colonel's name was, I remember, Painchaud, which is translated
Hotbread,--a funny name, which I never met elsewhere. We invited him
into the berth to give his lessons, but we had to clear away several
boxes and hampers to afford him space to stretch his legs under the
table. As he sat on the narrow locker with his bald head touching the
deck above, his elbows resting on the table, and his long legs stretched
out to the other side of the berth, while we youngsters in every variety
of attitude grouped ourselves round him, he looked like some antiquated
Gulliver among a party of rather overgrown Lilliputians. At first he
had a considerable number of pupils, but it was very evident that they
assembled more for the sake of trying if any fun could be found, than
with any serious intention of learning French. We had forgotten when we
had made our proposal that books would be necessary to enable us to make
any progress in the language, but not a French work of any sort was to
be procured on board, still less a grammar. At length the colonel
produced two from his valise. They were, I have reason to believe, not
such as would have tended to our edification; but happily, in the then
state of our knowledge of the language in which they were written, they
were not likely to hurt our morals. As we had no grammar, the colonel
made us understand that he wanted paper and pens and ink; and then he
wrote out words, and intimated to us that we were to repeat them after
him. He would take the hand of one of his pupils and exclaim "_main_,"
and make each of us repeat it after him. Then he would seize an ear and
cry out "_oreille_," and pretty hard he pinched too. If any of us cried
out, it evidently afforded him infinite amusement. We, of course, gave
him the name which he always afterwards kept, of Colonel Pinchard. When
any of his pupils pronounced the word wrongly, it was highly amusing to
watch the wonderful way in which his shoulders went up and his head sank
down between them. No English pair of shoulders could have behaved in
the same way; nor could certainly any English mouth have rolled out the
extraordinary expletives with which he was wont to give force to his
sentiments. His great delight was, however, pulling Grey's and my ears,
which, we agreed, was in revenge for taking him prisoner. One day he
wrote down _ne