ving me one day the history of his English studies. "I began on my
passage out, as soon as I got over my sea-sickness, and picked up the
rest in camp. I was compelled to write and talk, and so I learned to
write and talk. The officers were very kind and never laughed at me.
After the peace, Colonel Tarleton came over to Paris, and was presented
to the King one day when I happened to be at Court. The King asked him
how I spoke English. 'I cannot say how he speaks it, Sire,' said the
Colonel, 'but I occasionally had the good-luck to pick up some of his
letters that were going the wrong way, and I can assure your Majesty
that they were very well written.'"

His valet was an old soldier, who had served through the Peninsular War,
and who moved about with the orderly gait and quiet air of a man who had
passed his heyday under the forming influences of camp discipline.
He was a most respectable-looking man, as well as a most respectful
servant; and it was impossible to see him busying himself about the
General at his morning toilet, and watch his delicate handling of the
lather-brush and razor, without feeling, that, however true the old
proverb may have been in other cases, Bastien's master was a hero to
him.

The General's dress was always simple, though studiously neat. His
republicanism was of the school of Washington, and would have shrunk
from a public display of a bare neck and shirt-sleeves. Blue was his
usual winter color; a frock-coat in the morning, and a dress-coat for
dinner, and both near enough to the prevailing fashion to escape remark.
He had begun serious life too early to have ever been anything of a
dandy, even if Nature had seen fit to contradict herself so far as to
have intended him for one.

Jewelry I never saw him wear; but there was one little compartment in
his library filled with what in a certain sense might be called jewelry,
and of a kind that he had good reason to be proud of. In one of the
drawers was a sword made out of a key of the Bastile, and presented to
him by the city of Paris. The other key he sent to Washington. When he
was a young man the Bastile was a reality, and those keys still plied
their dismal work at the bidding of a power as insensible to the
suffering it caused as the steel of which they were made. Of the
hundreds who with sinking hearts had heard them turn in their massive
wards, how few had ever come back to tell the tale of their misery!
Lafayette himself, but for the