It was about half-past seven o’clock in the morning of the twenty-fifth of May, and Monsieur Bagasse was waiting for pupils to arrive. John Todd, a young fellow about fifteen or sixteen years of age, was at the bench, absorbed in cleaning pistols. Monsieur Bagasse himself, slowly shuffling up and down in front of the fencing implements, with a halt in his step, occasioned by one leg being shorter than the other, was absently smoking a short pipe, which he held to his mouth by the base of the bowl. He was a figure fit for the pencil of Callot or Gavarni. Sixty years old, but not looking more than a weather-beaten forty; of middling stature, brawny, round-shouldered, slightly bow-legged, with large splay feet, cased in shambling shoes, with an old cap on the back of his head, and his coarse, black hair, dashed with grey, showing under the crescent-shaped visor above his low, broad, corrugated forehead; with a dilapidated, old-fashioned stock around his neck, a slate-colored worsted jacket buttoned with horn buttons up to his throat, the sleeves of a red flannel shirt showing at his wrists, and coarse, dark, baggy trowsers on his lower limbs. His visage swarthy, ferruginous, picturesquely ugly, but suave and kindly, with a constant expression of curious interrogation upon it—an expression to which the ever upturned jaw contributed—to which the mouth, shaded by a rusty black moustache, and always inquiringly open, contributed—to which the eyes, one bleared and the other bright as a darkly-glowing coal, and both surmounted by shaggy eyebrows, contributed—and which had its contribution from the horn-rimmed goggles worn half way down on the bold aquiline nose, above which the eyes looked from the upturned face as though they were sighting at a mark along a cannon. Wrinkles, of course—wrinkles, and seams and crowsfeet in profusion; two noticeable fissures sloping deeply down the cheeks from the big nostrils; and on the right cheek a dim red scar—the record of a Frenchman’s last service to his Emperor at Waterloo. Add to all a general association of tobacco, snuff, and garlic, and you have the idea of Monsieur Bagasse. A step on the stairs announcing the approach of a visitor, Monsieur Bagasse halted, took his pipe from his mouth, and stood in a habitual attitude, his arms hung stiffly, his palms turned outward, his big feet also turned outward and visible from heel to toe, and his face sighting with curious inquiry at the door. The door opening presently, in came a young man of seven or eight and twenty, rather boyish-looking for his years, modishly, though tastefully, attired, whose name was Fernando Witherlee. “Good morning, Monsieur Bagasse. How de do,” he said, touching his moleskin hat with a kid-gloved finger, as, smiling constrainedly, and cringing into a super-elegant bow, he came forward. “Whew! how you smell of powder in here.”