CAPITAINE LEMAITRE.

He was one of those men that might be any age,--thirty, forty,
forty-five; there was no telling from his face what was years and what
was only weather. His countenance was of a grave and quiet, but also
luminous, sort, which was instantly admired and ever afterward
remembered, as was also the fineness of his hair and the blueness of his
eyes. Those pronounced him youngest who scrutinized his face the
closest. But waiving the discussion of age, he was odd, though not with
the oddness that he who had reared him had striven to produce.

He had not been brought up by mother or father. He had lost both in
infancy, and had fallen to the care of a rugged old military grandpa of
the colonial school, whose unceasing endeavor had been to make "his boy"
as savage and ferocious a holder of unimpeachable social rank as it
became a pure-blooded French Creole to be who would trace his pedigree
back to the god Mars.

"Remember, my boy," was the adjuration received by him as regularly as
his waking cup of black coffee, "that none of your family line ever kept
the laws of any government or creed." And if it was well that he should
bear this in mind, it was well to reiterate it persistently, for, from
the nurse's arms, the boy wore a look, not of docility so much as of
gentle, _judicial_ benevolence. The domestics of the old man's house
used to shed tears of laughter to see that look on the face of a babe.
His rude guardian addressed himself to the modification of this facial
expression; it had not enough of majesty in it, for instance, or of
large dare-deviltry; but with care these could be made to come.

And, true enough, at twenty-one (in Ursin Lemaitre), the labors of his