“Water, mingled with too many gun-shots, and after a difficult march, might prove unhealthy,” interrupted a hoarse voice, that of the doctor. “I should not recommend it as a remedy for my cold, but the water of your story, General,—for I suppose by your commencement your history is going to be a wet one,—will perhaps do me good.” “Good!” said the General, “here is the doctor who imagines I am going to give him a tonic. But so long as you have wished for it doctor, you must drink it. But no more interruptions:—I have already forgotten where I was.” “General,” replied the doctor, “you have just said ‘every one here is perhaps not fond of water;’ and you were not contradicted.” “Thanks!” said the General. “And silence in the ranks; I will recommence.” “Every one here does not like the water I said, very well, when I was little it seems I was of that same opinion. I didn’t like water. Let us understand each other fully as to the importance which you should attach to my repugnance to this fluid, during these first years of my life. I accepted water in many ways: I loved it sugared, and even with a little orange flavor, but I hated it cold on my face in winter, and only allowed myself to be washed willingly when it was warm. I liked, too, to stand on a bridge, and watch the water flowing underneath, and by a strange contradiction, I even enjoyed going on it, in a boat—_with papa_. But I should have had a horrible fear to fall in the water, or have it go suddenly over my head. To be frank, I believe I should have been frightened to have it up to my ankles, otherwise than in a foot bath. But then, one is not born perfect. “This fear of the water was the despair of my father. He, like a practical man, thought my love of boats and navigation, and my horror of all actual contact with it, were contradictory if not incompatible traits; that the liking for it on the one hand and the dislike of it on the other argued as complete an absence of logic in the brain of his little son as in his physical and moral organisms. He was right. Aunt Marie and my mother were guilty of the sugared and warm water, but my antipathy for it, otherwise than in these forms, seemed to be a fundamental part of my nature. “‘There is a reform for you to make in my absence,’ said my father to his wife and his sister-in-law. ‘If I don’t find it accomplished when I return, I agree in any way that you may find best, you will force me to intervene myself, with a method perhaps a little brusque, but of which I have more than once seen the efficacy. “‘Understand that if I have to throw Jacques into the water like a little dog, to teach him to save himself, I shall do it over and over again, until he finds it agreeable, until he conquers his fright, and learns to swim. Jacques pretends he wishes to become a sailor, like his father, but I shall not allow him to become one of those sailors,—and there are such,—who are actually afraid of the water.’”