a le pied bourgeois et la jambe canaille!" says
Barty. (It's because he's got common legs and vulgar feet.)

And that's about the lowest and meanest thing I ever heard him say
in his life.

Also, he was not always very sympathetic, as a boy, when one was
sick or sorry or out of sorts, for he had never been ill in his
life, never known an ache or a pain--except once the mumps, which he
seemed to thoroughly enjoy--and couldn't realize suffering of any
kind, except such suffering as most school-boys all over the world
are often fond of inflicting on dumb animals: this drove him
frantic, and led to many a licking by bigger boys. I remember
several such scenes--one especially.

One frosty morning in January, '48, just after breakfast, Jolivet
trois (tertius) put a sparrow into his squirrel's cage, and the
squirrel caught it in its claws, and cracked its skull like a nut
and sucked its brain, while the poor bird still made a desperate
struggle for life, and there was much laughter.

There was also, in consequence, a quick fight between Jolivet and
Josselin; in which Barty got the worst, as usual--his foe was two
years older, and quite an inch taller.

Afterwards, as the licked one sat on the edge of a small stone tank
full of water and dabbed his swollen eye with a wet pocket-handkerchief,
M. Dumollard, the mathematical master, made cheap fun of Britannic
sentimentality about animals, and told us how the English noblesse were
privileged to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their ankles,
and sell them "_au rabais_" in the horse-market of Smissfeld; and that
they paid men to box each other to death on the stage of Drury Lane, and
all that--deplorable things that we all know and are sorry for and
ashamed, but cannot put a stop to.

The boys laughed, of course; they always did when Dumollard tried to
be funny, "and many a joke had he," although his wit never
degenerated into mere humor.

But they were so fond of Barty that they forgave him his insular
affectation; some even helped him to dab his sore eye; among them
Jolivet trois himself, who was a very good-natured chap, and very
good-looking into the bargain; and he had received from Barty a sore
eye too--_gallice_, "un pochon"--_scholastice_, "un oeil au beurre
noir!"

By-the-way, _I_ fought with Jolivet once--about AEsop's fables! He
said that AEsop was a lame poet of Lacedaemon--I, that AEsop was a
little hunchback Armenian Jew; and I stuck to it. It wa