leshy dame du comptoir, in her light dress, with a
poppy-colored ribbon in her sleek hair. He saluted her gallantly, and
believed that she sustained with sufficient majesty her triumphal place
between two piles of punch-bowls properly crowned by billiard-balls. He
ascertained that the place was cheerful, neat, and strewn evenly with
yellow sand. He walked around it, looking at himself in the glasses as
he passed; approved the panels where guardsmen and amazons were drinking
champagne in a landscape filled with red holly-hocks; called for his
absinthe, smoked, found the divan soft and the absinthe good, and was
indulgent enough not to complain of the flies who bathed themselves in
his glass with true rustic familiarity.

Eight days later he had become one of the pillars of the Cafe Prosper.

They soon learned his punctual habits and anticipated his wishes, while
he, in turn, lunched with the patrons of the place--a valuable recruit
for those who haunted the cafe, folks oppressed by the tedium of a
country life, for whom the arrival of that new-comer, past master in all
games, and an admirable raconteur of his wars and his loves, was a true
stroke of good-fortune. The Captain himself was delighted to tell his
stories to folks who were still ignorant of his repertoire. There were
fully six months before him in which to tell of his games, his feats,
his battles, the retreat of Constantine, the capture of Bou-Maza, and
the officers' receptions with the concomitant intoxication of rum-punch.

[Illustration]

Human weakness! He was by no means sorry, on his part, to be something
of an oracle; he from whom the sub-lieutenants, new-comers at Saint-Cyr,
fled dismayed, fearing his long stories.

[Illustration]

His usual auditors were the keeper of the cafe, a stupid and silent
beer-cask, always in his sleeved vest, and remarkable only for his
carved pipe; the bailiff, a scoffer, dressed invariably in black,
scorned for his inelegant habit of carrying off what remained of his
sugar; the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much
amiability and a feeble constitution, who sent to the illustrated
journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary
surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and
democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain. This practitioner, a
man with tufted whiskers and eye-glasses, presided over the radical
committee of electors, and when the cure