The colonel's name was, I remember, Painchaud, which is translated Hotbread,--a funny name, which I never met elsewhere. We invited him into the berth to give his lessons, but we had to clear away several boxes and hampers to afford him space to stretch his legs under the table. As he sat on the narrow locker with his bald head touching the deck above, his elbows resting on the table, and his long legs stretched out to the other side of the berth, while we youngsters in every variety of attitude grouped ourselves round him, he looked like some antiquated Gulliver among a party of rather overgrown Lilliputians. At first he had a considerable number of pupils, but it was very evident that they assembled more for the sake of trying if any fun could be found, than with any serious intention of learning French. We had forgotten when we had made our proposal that books would be necessary to enable us to make any progress in the language, but not a French work of any sort was to be procured on board, still less a grammar. At length the colonel produced two from his valise. They were, I have reason to believe, not such as would have tended to our edification; but happily, in the then state of our knowledge of the language in which they were written, they were not likely to hurt our morals. As we had no grammar, the colonel made us understand that he wanted paper and pens and ink; and then he wrote out words, and intimated to us that we were to repeat them after him. He would take the hand of one of his pupils and exclaim "_main_," and make each of us repeat it after him. Then he would seize an ear and cry out "_oreille_," and pretty hard he pinched too. If any of us cried out, it evidently afforded him infinite amusement. We, of course, gave him the name which he always afterwards kept, of Colonel Pinchard. When any of his pupils pronounced the word wrongly, it was highly amusing to watch the wonderful way in which his shoulders went up and his head sank down between them. No English pair of shoulders could have behaved in the same way; nor could certainly any English mouth have rolled out the extraordinary expletives with which he was wont to give force to his sentiments. His great delight was, however, pulling Grey's and my ears, which, we agreed, was in revenge for taking him prisoner. One day he wrote down _nez_, and asked me what it meant. I replied by a loud neigh like a horse. The rest of the party took the joke and laughed, as I intended they should; but he, not understanding the cause of this, and thinking that they were laughing at him, seized my nose and gave it a tweak, which made me fancy he was pulling it off. In the impulse of the moment I sprang on the table, and seizing his nasal promontory, hauled away at it with hearty goodwill, and there we sat, he sending forth with unsurpassable rapidity a torrent of "Sa-c-r-r-es," which almost overwhelmed me; neither of us willing to be the first to let go. At