have put away the knapsacks and hung up the hats of the whole
regiment of Guides.

Aforetime, M. Loyal was a tradesman in the town. You can transact
business with no present tradesman in the town, and give your card
'chez M. Loyal,' but a brighter face shines upon you directly. We
doubt if there is, ever was, or ever will be, a man so universally
pleasant in the minds of people as M. Loyal is in the minds of the
citizens of our French watering-place. They rub their hands and
laugh when they speak of him. Ah, but he is such a good child,
such a brave boy, such a generous spirit, that Monsieur Loyal! It
is the honest truth. M. Loyal's nature is the nature of a
gentleman. He cultivates his ground with his own hands (assisted
by one little labourer, who falls into a fit now and then); and he
digs and delves from morn to eve in prodigious perspirations -
'works always,' as he says - but, cover him with dust, mud, weeds,
water, any stains you will, you never can cover the gentleman in M.
Loyal. A portly, upright, broad-shouldered, brown-faced man, whose
soldierly bearing gives him the appearance of being taller than he
is, look into the bright eye of M. Loyal, standing before you in
his working-blouse and cap, not particularly well shaved, and, it
may be, very earthy, and you shall discern in M. Loyal a gentleman
whose true politeness is ingrain, and confirmation of whose word by
his bond you would blush to think of. Not without reason is M.
Loyal when he tells that story, in his own vivacious way, of his
travelling to Fulham, near London, to buy all these hundreds and
hundreds of trees you now see upon the Property, then a bare, bleak
hill; and of his sojourning in Fulham three months; and of his
jovial evenings with the market-gardeners; and of the crowning
banquet before his departure, when the market-gardeners rose as one