n the grotto,
remembering that on that day he was seven years old, he determined to
let all his family see that he knew what he wished to become and do.
He would show them, he declared, that he was a little boy, a baby, no
longer; they should know that he was a boy who would be a man long
before other boys grew up, and would then show his family that they had
never really understood him.

At last he turned away and walked slowly toward home. The Bonaparte
house was, as I have told you, a big, bare, four-story, yellow-gray
house. It stood on a little narrow street, now called, after Napoleon's
mother, Letitia Place, in the town of Ajaccio. The street was not over
eight or ten feet wide; but opposite to the house was a little park that
allowed the Bonapartes to get both light and air--something that would
otherwise be hard to obtain in a street only ten feet wide.

Tired and thirsty from his walk through the sunshine of the hot August
afternoon, the boy started for the dining-room for a drink of water. As
he opened the door in his quick, impetuous way, he heard a noise as of
some one startled and fleeing. The swinging sash of the long French
window opposite him shut with a bang, and Napoleon had a glimpse of a
bit of white skirt, caught for an instant on the window-fastening.

"Ah, ha! it was not a bird, then, that fluttering," he said. "It was a
girl. One of my sisters. Now, which one, I wonder? and why did she run?
I do not care to catch her. It is no sport playing with girls."

So little curiosity did he have in the matter, that he did not follow on
the track of the fugitive, nor even go to the window to look out; but,
walking up to the sideboard, he opened it to take the water-pitcher and
get a drink.

As he did so, he started. There stood the basket of fruit which Saveria
had filled so carefully with fruit for his uncle the canon. But now the
basket was only half filled. Who had taken the fruit?

He clapped his hands together in surprise; for the fruit of his uncle
the canon was something no one in the house dared to touch. Punishment
swift and sure would descend upon the culprit.

"But, look!" he said half-aloud; "who has dared to touch the fruit of
my uncle the canon? Touch it? My faith! they have taken half of it. Ah,
that skirt! Could it have been--it must have been one of my sisters. But
which one?"

As he stood thus wondering, his eyes still fixed upon the rifled basket
of fruit, he heard behind him a