val signals is not less transformed; there is a
long distance between the four pennants, red, white, yellow, and blue,
of Labourdonnaye, and the eighteen flags of these days, which, hoisted
two and two, three and three, or four and four, furnish, for distant
communication, sixty-six thousand combinations, are never deficient,
and, so to speak, foresee the unforeseen.

IV

ONE IS VULNERABLE WHERE ONE LOVES

Mess Lethierry's heart and hand were always ready--a large heart and a
large hand. His failing was that admirable one, self-confidence. He had
a certain fashion of his own of undertaking to do a thing. It was a
solemn fashion. He said, "I give my word of honour to do it, with God's
help." That said, he went through with his duty. He put his faith in
God--nothing more. His rare churchgoing was merely formal. At sea he was
superstitious.

Nevertheless, the storm had never yet arisen which could daunt him. One
reason of this was his impatience of opposition. He could tolerate it
neither from the ocean nor anything else. He meant to have his way; so
much the worse for the sea if it thwarted him. It might try, if it
would, but Mess Lethierry would not give in. A refractory wave could no
more stop him than an angry neighbour. What he had said was said; what
he planned out was done. He bent neither before an objection nor before
the tempest. The word "no" had no existence for him, whether it was in
the mouth of a man or in the angry muttering of a thunder-cloud. In the
teeth of all he went on in his way. He would take no refusals. Hence his
obstinacy in life, and his intrepidity on the ocean.

He seasoned his simple meal of fish soup for himself, knowing the
quantities of pepper, salt, and herbs which it required, and was as well
pleased with the cooking as with the meal. To complete the sketch of
Lethierry's peculiarities, the reader must conjure a being to whom the
putting on of a surtout would amount to a transfiguration; whom a
landsman's greatcoat would convert into a strange animal; one who,
standing with his locks blown about by the wind, might have represented
old Jean Bart, but who, in the landsman's round hat, would have looked
an idiot; awkward in cities, wild and redoubtable at sea; a man with
broad shoulders, fit for a porter; one who indulged in no oaths, was
rarely in anger, whose voice had a soft accent, which became like
thunder in a speaking-trumpet; a peasant who had read something of the
phi