relic in the street.  He looked certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar—­or at any rate to have played his little part there as a powder-monkey.  Shortly after we had been introduced he had informed me in a Franco-Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless jaws, that when he was a “shaver no higher than that” he had seen the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba.  It was at night, he narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and Antibes in the open country.  A big fire had been lit at the side of the cross-roads.  The population from several villages had collected there, old and young—­down to the very children in arms, because the women had refused to stay at home.  Tall soldiers wearing high, hairy caps, stood in a circle facing the people silently, and their stern eyes and big moustaches were enough to make everybody keep at a distance.  He, “being an impudent little shaver,” wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers’ legs, and peeping through discovered standing perfectly still in the light of the fire “a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat, buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big pale face, inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest.  His hands were clasped behind his back. . . .  It appears that this was the Emperor,” the Ancient commented with a faint sigh.  He was staring from the ground with all his might, when “my poor father,” who had been searching for his boy frantically everywhere, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.

The tale seems an authentic recollection.  He related it to me many times, using the very same words.  The grandfather honoured me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection.  Extremes touch.  He was the oldest member by a long way in that Company, and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby.  He had been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember; thirty—­forty years.  He did not seem certain himself, but it could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the Pilot-office.  He had been pensioned off years before, but he went out from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the Company once confided to me in a whisper, “the old chap did no harm.  He was not in the way.”  They treated him with rough deference.  One and another would address some insignificant remark to him now and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say.  He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very wisdom.  He wore long, green, worsted stockings, pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet.  Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant.  Half a dozen hands would be extended to help him on board, but afterwards he was left pretty much to his own thoughts.  Of course he never did any work, except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed:  “He, l’Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your hand”—­or some such request of an easy kind.