time with the landlady of another inn at Colmar. George Voss was
known to be a clever young man; many in those parts declared that he
was much more so than his father; and when he became clerk at the
Poste in Colmar, and after a year or two had taken into his hands
almost the entire management of that house--so that people began to
say that old-fashioned and wretched as it was, money might still be
made there--people began to say also that Michel Voss had been wrong
to allow his son to leave Granpere. But in truth there had been a
few words between the father and the son; and the two were so like
each other that the father found it difficult to rule, and the son
found it difficult to be ruled.

George Voss was very like his father, with this difference, as he
was often told by the old folk about Granpere, that he would never
fill his father's shoes. He was a smaller man, less tall by a
couple of inches, less broad in proportion across the shoulders,
whose arm would never be so strong, whose leg would never grace a
tight stocking with so full a development. But he had the same eye,
bright and brown and very quick, the same mouth, the same aquiline
nose, the same broad forehead and well-shaped chin, and the same
look in his face which made men know as by instinct that he would
sooner command than obey. So there had come to be a few words, and
George Voss had gone away to the house of a cousin of his mother's,
and had taken to commanding there.

Not that there had been any quarrel between the father and the son;
nor indeed that George was aware that he had been in the least
disobedient to his parent. There was no recognised ambition for
rule in the breasts of either of them. It was simply this, that
their tempers were alike; and when on an occasion Michel told his