my cousin
Alain. For two-pence I could have gone farther and taken four horses; so
extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened
conscience. But I feared to be conspicuous. Even as it was, we attracted
only too much attention, with our pair and that white elephant, the
seventy-pounds-worth of claret-coloured chaise.

Meanwhile I was ashamed to look Rowley in the face. The young shaver had
contrived to put me wholly in the wrong; he had cost me a night's rest
and a severe and healthful humiliation; and I was grateful and
embarrassed in his society. This would never do; it was contrary to all
my ideas of discipline; if the officer has to blush before the private,
or the master before the servant, nothing is left to hope for but
discharge or death. I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and
accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the
scholar--how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired. His interest
never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound
refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it
again with magical celerity. Say it happened to be _stirrup_. "No, I
don't seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne," he would say: "it don't
seem to stick to me, that word don't." And then, when I had told it him
again, "_Etrier!_" he would cry. "To be sure! I had it on the tip of my
tongue. _Eterier!_" (going wrong already, as if by a fatal instinct).
"What will I remember it by, now? Why, _interior_, to be sure! I'll
remember it by its being something that ain't in the interior of a
horse." And when next I had occasion to ask him the French for stirrup,
it was a toss-up whether he had forgotten all about it, or gave me
_exterior_ for an answer. He was never a hair discouraged. He seemed to
consider that he was covering the ground at a normal rate. He came up
smiling day after day. "Now, sir, shall we do our French?" he would say;
and I would put questions, and elicit copious commentary and
explanation, but never the shadow of an answer. My hands fell to my
sides; I could have wept to hear him. When I reflected that he had as
yet learned nothing, and what a vast deal more there was for him to
learn, the period of these lessons seemed to unroll before me vast as
eternity, and I saw myself a teacher of a hundred, and Rowley a pupil of
ninety, still hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should
say, was quite unspoiled by th