and interest the old war-horse greatly. He
went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was
covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's
broadside, not yet finished.

"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past
three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at
nine o'clock. If I had to write a banal note, it might take time, but
there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked
a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and
when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty-three
years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time"--the old
gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick
movement of shoulders and hands, concluded--"it would be a public
calamity--a malheur public!"

I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and
editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as
painters by becoming popular illustrators, the young writers content to
substitute overpaid banality and bathos for honest work, and I must
confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known
great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up
before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose,
stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting
blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks
less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a
trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and
cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight
and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit--for
its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its
tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.

Monday.

The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on
the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we bumped into each other
in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young
University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has
to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle
still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these
days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he
fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it
a