BRANDER MATTHEWS.

THE CAPTAIN'S VICES.

[Illustration: THE CAPTAIN'S VICES]

I.

It is of no importance, the name of the little provincial city where
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--installed himself when he was retired on a pension.

It was quite like all those other little villages which solicit without
obtaining it a branch of the railway; just as if it were not the sole
dissipation of the natives to go every day, at the same hour, to the
Place de la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at full gallop, with
its gay cracking of the whips and clang of bells.

It was a place of three thousand inhabitants--ambitiously denominated
souls in the statistical tables--and was exceedingly proud of its title
of chief city of the canton. It had ramparts planted with trees, a
pretty river with good fishing, a church of the charming epoch of the
flamboyant Gothic, disgraced by a frightful station of the cross,
brought directly from the quarter of Saint Sulpice. Every Monday its
market was gay with great red and blue umbrellas, and countrymen filled
its streets in carts and carriages. But for the rest of the week it
retired with delight into that silence and solitude which made it so
dear to its rustic population. Its streets were paved with
cobble-stones; through the windows of the ground-floor one could see
samplers and wax-flowers under glass domes, and, through the gates of
the gardens, statuettes of Napoleon in shell-work. The principal inn was
naturally called the Shield of France; and the town-clerk made rhymed
acrostics for the ladies of society.

Captain Mercadier had chosen that place of retreat for the simple reason
that he had been born there, and because, in his noisy childhood, he had
pulled down the signs and plugged up the bell-buttons. He returned there
to find neither relations, nor friends, nor acquaintances; and the
recollections of his youth recalled only the angry faces of shop-keepers
who shook their fists at him from the shop-doors, a catechism which
threatened him with hell, a school which predicted the scaffold, and,
finally, his departure for his regiment, hastened by a paternal
malediction.

For the Captain was not a saintly man; the old record of his punishment
was black with days in the guard-house inflicted for breaches of
discipline, absences from roll-calls, and nocturnal uproars in the
mess-room. H