John Francis is a smiling prosperous man with a hard shrewd eye; he talked interminably of his business, boasted of his money and of the fine linen that he sold by the special favor of Providence. Anthony’s lips are shaved but he wears a little beard on his chin; and is morose and cold in his manner. He also talked of his trade in books, his journeys to Geneva, his affairs generally, and attributed his prosperity to God, but it seemed to be a different Deity. Neither listened, but kept on monotonously repeating the same refrain, until at last they became annoyed and began to introduce topics of a controversial nature, one dwelling on the progress of _The_ Religion, the other on the stability of _The_ True Faith; all the time each ignored his antagonist, sat as if nailed to his seat, and spoke with the utmost contempt, and in a sharp rasping voice, of the enemies’ God. In the middle of the table sat my son Michael, sergeant in the Sacermore regiment; he is called a rascal, but is not a bad fellow on the whole, and the behavior of his brothers diverted him extremely, sending him into fits of laughter. He kept turning from one to the other, like an animal in a cage, to stare into the angry faces of his elders, and at last interrupted them without ceremony, telling them that they were fat sheep of the same breed even if their fleece was marked with a different brand, and that he had seen plenty of their sort killed and eaten. The youngest son Anisse sat and gazed at him with horror. His name was certainly well chosen, for he never could have invented gunpowder; discussions are his abhorrence, for he takes no real interest in anything on earth; his only joy is to yawn and dawdle throughout the livelong day. Politics and religion seem to him diabolical inventions to disturb the sleep of sensible men. “Good or bad,” he would say, “what I have is enough for me, so why change it? Why turn over the mattress when I made the hole in the middle myself?” Poor fellow! people will persist in shaking up his feather-bed whether he likes it or not, which angers him so much that, mild as he is, he would like to send his disturbers to instant execution. His brothers’ loud voices positively scared him, making him duck his head as if to avoid a blow.