I say we were the only English; but is that quite just? For on the first morning, while I was arranging with the bathing master in his little _guichet_ for our tickets and so forth, he sent for one of the bathing men to be our particular attendant, on the grounds that he was English, or, at any rate, knew English. "The Englishman," therefore, he became in our minds; but what English! He had one word--"awry"--which meant the very opposite, "All right," and this he used continually. He could also say "ole man." No more. The secret of his reputation as a linguist was a sojourn he had made in San Francisco; but it is extremely easy, I take it, in San Francisco, to consort only with your own countrymen, no matter what race is yours, and therefore avoid the necessity of learning any new tongue. The Englishman, however, was our friend. He taught the children to swim; he placed his double canoe at our exclusive disposal at a heavy cost; he fixed the awning of the tent; he procured additional deck-chairs; he brought bottles. And once he fought for us. During his momentary absence one morning we had received some attention from another of the men, and the Englishman had heard about it. Such a liberty was, of course, outrageous and must be punished; and the Englishman set to work to chastise this upstart and interloper. The attendants had cubicles at the head of the little pier, side by side, and the Englishman and his foe chose this site for their battle, for all the world to see. They began by calling each other names at a distance of a yard; then they closed up and shouted these and other names into each other's very mouths. Then they took to fisticuffs. Not, however, in any vulgar northern way, upon each other's body, but on the doors and walls of each other's cubicle. They fought like this for ten minutes, beating the woodwork mercilessly, every blow being accompanied by a new epithet, which it is fortunate was not in any language that we understood; and then they disappeared within, each in his own lair. For a while there was silence, to the intense regret of the _plage_, but not for long; for the Englishman would think of something good which he had not yet called the other, and would come out and call it him, with a knock-out blow on the panel; and the other would remember a terrible insult which had been hurled at him a year or two ago and which, in the excitement of the past few minutes, had escaped his memory, and he would fire this into the Englishman with an undercut on the pitch pine. They came out so rhythmically that one could almost believe they were consulting slang dictionaries in the meanwhile; and then the warfare gradually died down, as the dictionaries gave out, and in half an hour they were in friendly intercourse again. From the circumstance that the other man ever after avoided us, we gathered that the Englishman had won. CHAPTER XXIV