By nature a good-tempered man?  No; very little gentleness, confounding the quality with weakness.  Fierce and wrathful when crossed?  Very, and stupendously unreasonable.  Moody?  Exceedingly so.  Vindictive?  Well; he had had scowling thoughts that he would formally curse his daughter, as he had seen it done on the stage.  But remembering that the real Heaven is some paces removed from the mock one in the great chandelier of the Theatre, he had given that up.

And he had come abroad to be rid of his repudiated daughter for the rest of his life.  And here he was.

At bottom, it was for this reason, more than for any other, that Mr. The Englishman took it extremely ill that Corporal Theophile should be so devoted to little Bebelle, the child at the Barber’s shop.  In an unlucky moment he had chanced to say to himself, “Why, confound the fellow, he is not her father!” There was a sharp sting in the speech which ran into him suddenly, and put him in a worse mood.  So he had National Participled the unconscious Corporal with most hearty emphasis, and had made up his mind to think no more about such a mountebank.

But it came to pass that the Corporal was not to be dismissed.  If he had known the most delicate fibres of the Englishman’s mind, instead of knowing nothing on earth about him, and if he had been the most obstinate Corporal in the Grand Army of France, instead of being the most obliging, he could not have planted himself with more determined immovability plump in the midst of all the Englishman’s thoughts.  Not only so, but he seemed to be always in his view.  Mr. The Englishman had but to look out of window, to look upon the Corporal with little Bebelle.  He had but to go for a walk, and there was the Corporal walking with Bebelle.  He had but to come home again, disgusted, and the Corporal and Bebelle were at home before him.  If he looked out at his back windows early in the morning, the Corporal was in the Barber’s back yard, washing and dressing and brushing Bebelle.  If he took refuge at his front windows, the Corporal brought his breakfast out into the Place, and shared it there with Bebelle.  Always Corporal and always Bebelle.  Never Corporal without Bebelle.  Never Bebelle without Corporal.

Mr. The Englishman was not particularly strong in the French language as a means of oral communication, though he read it very well.  It is with languages as with people,—­when you only know them by sight, you are apt to mistake them; you must be on speaking terms before you can be said to have established an acquaintance.

For this reason, Mr. The Englishman had to gird up his loins considerably before he could bring himself to the point of exchanging ideas with Madame Bouclet on the subject of this Corporal and this Bebelle.  But Madame Bouclet looking in apologetically one morning to remark, that, O Heaven! she was in a state of desolation because the lamp-maker had not sent home that lamp confided to him to repair, but that truly he was a lamp-maker against whom the whole world shrieked out, Mr. The Englishman seized the occasion.