n
at one of the little tables, and bade Pere la Chaise bring a bottle of his
best wine. The place was already full of people, drinking, talking, and
singing. A young man of twenty-six or twenty-seven entered almost timidly
and sat down at the table where my father was--for he saw that all the
other places were occupied--and ordered a half-bottle of cider. He was a
Norman gardener. My father knew him by sight; he had met him here several
times without speaking to him. You recognized the peasant at once; and yet
his exquisite neatness, the gentleness of his face, distinguished him from
his kind. Joseph Carpentier was dressed[8] in a very ordinary gray woolen
coat; but his coarse shirt was very white, and his hair, when he took off
his broad-brimmed hat, was well combed and glossy.

As Carpentier was opening his bottle a second frequenter entered the
_cabaret_. This was a man of thirty or thirty-five, with strong features
and the frame of a Hercules. An expression of frankness and gayety
overspread his sunburnt face. Cottonade pantaloons, stuffed into a pair of
dirty boots, and a _vareuse_ of the same stuff made up his dress. His
vareuse, unbuttoned, showed his breast, brown and hairy; and a horrid cap
with long hair covered, without concealing, a mass of red locks that a
comb had never gone through. A long whip, the stock of which he held in
his hand, was coiled about his left arm. He advanced to the counter and
asked for a glass of brandy. He was a drayman named John Gordon--an
Irishman.

But, strange, John Gordon, glass in hand, did not drink; Carpentier, with
his fingers round the neck of the bottle, failed to pour his cider; and my
father himself, his eyes attracted to another part of the room, forgot his
wine. Every one was looking at an individual gesticulating and haranguing
in the middle of the place, to the great amusement of all. My father
recognized him at first sight. He was an Italian about the age of Gordon;
short, thick-set, powerful, swarthy, with the neck of a bull and hair as
black as ebony. He was telling rapidly, with strong gestures, in an almost
incomprehensible mixture of Spanish, English, French, and Italian, the
story of a hunting party that he had made up five years before. This was
Mario Carlo. A Neapolitan by birth, he had for several years worked as a
blacksmith on the plantation of one of our neighbors, M. Alphonse Perret.
Often papa had heard him tell of this hunt, for nothing could be more