The Preceptor.


Roland removed to France, and fixed his abode in the environs of Paris.
He placed Blanche at a convent in the immediate neighborhood, going to
see her daily, and gave himself up to the education of his son. The boy
was apt to learn; but to unlearn was here the arduous task,--and for
that task it would have needed either the passionless experience, the
exquisite forbearance, of a practised teacher, or the love and
confidence and yielding heart of a believing pupil. Roland felt that he
was not the man to be the teacher, and that his son's heart remained
obstinately closed to him. He looked round, and found at the other side
of Paris what seemed a suitable preceptor,--a young Frenchman of some
distinction in letters, more especially in science, with all a
Frenchman's eloquence of talk, full of high-sounding sentiments that
pleased the romantic enthusiasm of the Captain; so Roland, with sanguine
hopes, confided his son to this man's care. The boy's natural quickness
mastered readily all that pleased his taste; he learned to speak and
write French with rare felicity and precision. His tenacious memory,
and those flexile organs in which the talent for languages is placed,
served, with the help of an English master, to revive his earlier
knowledge of his father's tongue and to enable him to speak it with
fluent correctness,--though there was always in his accent something
which had struck me as strange; but not suspecting it to be foreign, I
had thought it a theatrical affectation. He did not go far into
science,--little further, perhaps, than a smattering of French
mathematics; but he acquired a remarkable facility and promptitude in
calculation. He devoured eagerly the light reading thrown in his way,
and picked up thence that kind of knowledge which novels and plays