"Confess! confess!" roared the confessor, dealing the kneeling
impenitent a sounding cuff on the ear.

"Ask Pierre how he got his certificate," roared Père Duhaut.
"_Demandez-lui! Demandez-lui!_"

But we never did.

Until his grave received him, only a few weeks ago, a marked character
of our ville was a stooping old man, of a ghastly paleness, noted
through all the region for avarice and for speaking every one of his
many languages each with worse accent than the other. His Spanish
sounded like German, his German had the strongest possible American
accent, his English was vividly Teutonic, and after forty years of
marriage his Norman wife never ceased to mock at his atrociously-mouthed
French. He was wine-merchant and banker combined, and, though his social
position was among the best in our bourgeoise ville, all the world
smiled with the knowledge that the rich old _banquier_, whose nose
had a strong Hebraic curve, delivered his own merchandise at night from
under his long coat, in order to escape the tax on every bottle of wine
transported from one domicile to another.

The stately gate-post of "Père S----'s" pretentious and philistine
mansion is decorated with the coats-of-arms of several nations.
England's is there, Germany's, Spain's, Portugal's, as well as our own
Eagle; while upon days when our own exiled hearts beat most proudly--4th
of July and 22d of February--our star-spangled banner floats from his
roof-top as well as from our own, the only two, of course, in our ville.
Our ville, so important to us, has scarcely an existence for our home