“What large gentlemen was that sitting on the other side?” asked the young man, as his companion sat down with the air of having finished an oration.

“No gentleman at all!” thundered the citizen.  “That fellow” (beetling frown), “that fellow is Edward Livingston.”

“The great lawyer?”

“The great villain!”

Frowenfeld himself frowned.

The old man laid a hand upon his junior’s shoulder and growled benignantly: 

“My young friend, your displeasure delights me!”

The patience with which Frowenfeld was bearing all this forced a chuckle and shake of the head from the marchande.

Citizen Fusilier went on speaking in a manner that might be construed either as address or soliloquy, gesticulating much and occasionally letting out a fervent word that made passers look around and Joseph inwardly wince.  With eyes closed and hands folded on the top of the knotted staff which he carried but never used, he delivered an apostrophe to the “spotless soul of youth,” enticed by the “spirit of adventure” to “launch away upon the unploughed sea of the future!” He lifted one hand and smote the back of the other solemnly, once, twice, and again, nodding his head faintly several times without opening his eyes, as who should say, “Very impressive; go on,” and so resumed; spoke of this spotless soul of youth searching under unknown latitudes for the “sunken treasures of experience”; indulged, as the reporters of our day would say, in “many beautiful nights of rhetoric,” and finally depicted the loathing with which the spotless soul of youth “recoils!”—­suiting the action to the word so emphatically as to make a pretty little boy who stood gaping at him start back—­“on encountering in the holy chambers of public office the vultures hatched in the nests of ambition and avarice!”

Three or four persons lingered carelessly near by with ears wide open.  Frowenfeld felt that he must bring this to an end, and, like any young person who has learned neither deceit nor disrespect to seniors, he attempted to reason it down.

“You do not think many of our public men are dishonest!”

“Sir!” replied the rhetorician, with a patronizing smile, “h-you must be thinking of France!”

“No, sir; of Louisiana.”

“Louisiana!  Dishonest?  All, sir, all.  They are all as corrupt as Olympus, sir!”

“Well,” said Frowenfeld, with more feeling than was called for, “there is one who, I feel sure, is pure.  I know it by his face!”

The old man gave a look of stern interrogation.

“Governor Claiborne.”

“Ye-e-e g-hods!  Claiborne! Claiborne! Why, he is a Yankee!”

The lion glowered over the lamb like a thundercloud.

“He is a Virginian,” said Frowenfeld.

“He is an American, and no American can be honest.”

“You are prejudiced,” exclaimed the young man.