nged to the lower middle class, the boy had learnt to read, and they
brought it up in a fashion. The mother, pale and almost in rags, gave
"instruction," as she called it, mechanically, to the little one, heard
it spell a few words to her, and interrupted the lesson to accompany
her husband on some criminal expedition, or to earn the wages of
prostitution. Meanwhile, the book remained open on the table as she had
left it, and the boy sat beside it, meditating in his way.

The father and mother, detected one day in one of their criminal
enterprises, suddenly vanished into that obscurity in which the penal
laws envelop convicted malefactors. The child, too, disappeared.

Lethierry, in his wanderings about the world, stumbled, one day, on an
adventurer like himself; helped him out of some scrape; rendered him a
kindly service, and was apparently repaid with gratitude. He took a
fancy to the stranger, picked him up, and brought him to Guernsey,
where, finding him intelligent in learning the duties of a sailor aboard
a coasting vessel, he made him a companion. This stranger was the little
Rantaine, now grown up to manhood.

Rantaine, like Lethierry, had a bull neck, a large and powerful breadth
of shoulders for carrying burdens, and loins like those of the Farnese
Hercules. Lethierry and he had a remarkable similarity of appearance:
Rantaine was the taller. People who saw their forms behind as they were
walking side by side along the port, exclaimed, "There are two
brothers." On looking them in the face the effect was different: all
that was open in the countenance of Lethierry was reserved and cautious
in that of Rantaine. Rantaine was an expert swordsman, played on the
harmonica, could snuff a candle at twenty paces with a pistol-ball,
could strike a tremendous blow with the fist, recite verses from
Voltaire's _Henriade_, and interpret dreams; he knew by heart _Les
Tombeaux de Saint Denis_, by Treneuil. He talked sometimes of having had
relations with the Sultan of Calicut, "whom the Portuguese call the
Zamorin." If any one had seen the little memorandum-book which he
carried about with him, he would have found notes and jottings of this
kind: "At Lyons in a fissure of the wall of one of the cells in the
prison of St. Joseph, a file." He spoke always with a grave
deliberation; he called himself the son of a Chevalier de Saint Louis.
His linen was of a miscellaneous kind, and marked with different
initials. Nobody was eve