r more tender than he was on the point of
honour; he fought and killed his man. The mother of a pretty actress
could not have an eye more watchful for an insult.

He might have stood for the personification of subtlety under an outer
garb of enormous strength.

It was the power of his fist, applied one day at a fair, upon a _cabeza
de moro_, which had originally taken the fancy of Lethierry. No one in
Guernsey knew anything of his adventures. They were of a chequered kind.
If the great theatre of destiny had a special wardrobe, Rantaine ought
to have taken the dress of harlequin. He had lived, and had seen the
world. He had run through the gamut of possible trades and qualities;
had been a cook at Madagascar, trainer of birds at Honolulu, a religious
journalist at the Galapagos Islands, a poet at Oomrawuttee, a freeman at
Haiti. In this latter character he had delivered at Grand Goave a
funeral oration, of which the local journals have preserved this
fragment: "Farewell, then, noble spirit. In the azure vault of the
heavens, where thou wingest now thy flight, thou wilt, no doubt, rejoin
the good Abbe Leander Crameau, of Little Goave. Tell him that, thanks to
ten years of glorious efforts, thou hast completed the church of the
_Ansa-a-Veau_. Adieu! transcendent genius, model mason!" His freemason's
mask did not prevent him, as we see, wearing a little of the Roman
Catholic. The former won to his side the men of progress, and the latter
the men of order. He declared himself a white of pure caste, and hated
the negroes; though, for all that, he would certainly have been an
admirer of the Emperor Soulouque. In 1815, at Bordeaux, the glow of his
royalist enthusiasm broke forth in the shape of a huge white feather in
his cap. His life had been a series of eclipses--of appearances,
disappearances, and reappearances. He was a sort of revolving light upon
the coasts of scampdom. He knew a little Turkish: instead of
"guillotined," would say "_neboisse_." He had been a slave in Tripoli,
in the house of a Thaleb, and had learnt Turkish by dint of blows with a
stick. His employment had been to stand at evenings at the doors of the
mosque, there to read aloud to the faithful the Koran inscribed upon
slips of wood, or pieces of camel leather. It is not improbable that he
was a renegade.

He was capable of everything, and something worse.

He had a trick of laughing loud and knitting his brows at the same time.
He used to say, "In