With every foot of the Bocage he became acquainted; he travelled it over and over; he was spun like a thread of destiny into and around its level fields and farms; he crossed and re-crossed its fords; he lost and won its towns; he held its fortunes for a year in the hollow of his hand; his grave, like his birth, was in its bosom. It is small wonder that a species of folk-lore, in his own neighborhood, has, in three generations, grown up around him, which makes it a difficult thing to disentangle what is true of him from what might as well be true: for the French are not given, even in their gossip, to incongruities. Every rustic, who, having served under Henri, lived to startle a more prosaic world with his reminiscences, had anecdotes to tell of him really vital and precious; and the travellers who were able to gather them at first hand, like Monsieur Eugène Genoude and Viscount Francis Walsh, are yet to be envied. It is known from oral report how he would run any risk for a charge of his, were he, in particular, a child or a coward; or how he would deny himself bread while one mouth hungered near him; how he was a fatal apparition, looming bare-headed from the saddle, pistol in hand, to those who encountered him in a charge: for he had a sure aim, and no genteel misgivings as to his present duty. Picked out for the object of many raids, he had the strength of nerve to save himself repeatedly, by blowing out the brains of a dozen. When he achieved an admitted advantage, he seemed to overflow instantly with his native kindness and compassion. His military career was less one of thought and command than of manual killing and sparing: and in that particular he belonged with the ancient world, with Gideon and with Hector. The endless patience which he brought to bear on his heart-breaking circumstance and his ungovernable mass of men, out-soars praise. Not once, among the contradiction, the disorder, the stupidity which he deplored, was he anything but just. This autumnal sweetness of his character, which he seemed to have inherited in full at Lescure’s death, was its first and last distinction. It helped him, at an age when moods alternate with the pendulum, to take prosperity without pride, trials without a plaint. Young in every fibre, he had not a trace of the severity of youth, its raw dominance, its hasty partial will.