but would get very angry at his tormentors, and would bite and scratch
and fight like any little savage. He had, as a child, what is known as
an ungovernable temper, although he was able to keep it under control
until the moment came when he could both say and do to his own
satisfaction. He loved his father and mother; he loved his brothers and
sisters; he loved his uncle, the Canon Lucien; he loved, more than all
his other playmates and companions, his boy-uncle, fat, twelve-year-old
Joey Fesch, who had taught him his letters, and been his admirer and
follower from babyhood.

But though he loved them all, he loved his own way best; and he was
bound to have it, however much his father might talk, his mother chide,
or his uncle the canon correct him. So, as he stood in the grotto,
remembering that on that day he was seven years old, he determined to
let all his family see that he knew what he wished to become and do.
He would show them, he declared, that he was a little boy, a baby, no
longer; they should know that he was a boy who would be a man long
before other boys grew up, and would then show his family that they had
never really understood him.

At last he turned away and walked slowly toward home. The Bonaparte
house was, as I have told you, a big, bare, four-story, yellow-gray
house. It stood on a little narrow street, now called, after Napoleon's
mother, Letitia Place, in the town of Ajaccio. The street was not over
eight or ten feet wide; but opposite to the house was a little park that
allowed the Bonapartes to get both light and air--something that would
otherwise be hard to obtain in a street only ten feet wide.

Tired and thirsty from his walk through the sunshine of the hot August
afternoon, the boy started for the dining-room for a drink of water. As