He would slang a fellow horribly one day, and wave his arms and pretty nearly jump out of his skin; and the next day he would bring up a whacking pear for the fellow he’d slanged, or a new knife or something. He pretty nearly cried sometimes, and he told us his nerves were frightfully tricky, and often led him to be harsh when he didn’t mean it. He couldn’t keep order or make chaps work if they didn’t choose; and Steggles, who had an awfully cunning dodge of always rubbing him up the wrong way, and then looking crushed and broken-hearted so as to get things, which he did, said that Frenchy was like damp fireworks, because you never knew exactly when he’d go off or how. One day, dashing out of class with a frightful yell, Freckles got sent for, and went back and found Monsieur raving mad. It seemed that Freckles had yelled too soon--before he was out of the class-room, in fact, and Frenchy had got palpitation of the heart from it. He let into Freckles properly then. He said he was his “_bête noire_” and “_un sot à vingt-quatre carats_”--which means an eighteen-carat ass in English, but twenty-four carats in French--and “one of the aborigines who ought to be kept on a chain,” and many other such-like things. Freckles turned all colors, and then white, with a sort of bluish tint to his lips. He didn’t say a word, but looked at Frenchy with such a frightful expression that I felt something would happen later. All that happened at the time was that Freckles got the eighth book of Telemachus to write out into French from English, and then correct by Fénelon, which was a pretty big job if a chap had been fool enough to try and do it; and Monsieur Michel went off to Merivale with a big card on his coat-tail with “_Ici on parle Français_” written upon it in red pencil. This I had managed to do myself while Frenchy was jawing Freckles. I told Freckles, but it didn’t comfort him much. He said there were some things no mortal chap could stand; and to be called “an aborigine” because a man was born in Australia seemed to him about the bitterest insult even an old frog-eating Frenchman could have invented. Happening to _him_, of all chaps, it was especially a thing which would have to be revenged, seeing what his views were. He said: “I couldn’t bushrange or anything with a clear conscience in the future if I had a thing like this hanging over me unrevenged. It’s the frightfulest slur on my character, and I won’t sit down under it for fifty Frenchmen.” Then he said he should take a week to settle what to do, and went into the playground alone. Next time Frenchy came up he was just the same as ever--awfully easy-going and jolly, and let Freckles off the Telemachus, and offered him as classy a knife, with a corkscrew and other things, including tweezers, as ever you saw--just the knife for Freckles, considering his ways. But it didn’t come off. Freckles got white again when he saw the knife, and said: