All evils have their compensations; and this amiable weakness of Miss Dorris sometimes became a source of joy to the community of Les Oliviers, when properly manipulated by M. Isidore, for example. For it was the especial delight of this fair young creature to impart recently acquired knowledge to her neighbours, and recently acquired knowledge being undigested, and in many cases hastily and inaccurately received, sometimes emerges from its temporary lodging in the brain in a changed, even unrecognizable, form. Moreover, M. Isidore, having an imagination of unusual fertility and an impish delight in mischief, was tempted to confide myths having only a poetic and ideal foundation in fact, to the ear of Dorris, in the sure anticipation of hearing them issue in some novel form from the pink coral lips at _table d'hôte_; always providing he listened, as he frequently did, unseen behind an open door, to the general buzz of table talk, above which Miss Boundrish's arrogant treble shrilled high and incessant. When the intelligence conveyed by the pink coral lips was very wildly improbable, that every conscript, for example, during his first month of service, was dieted entirely on frogs to inspire him with martial courage, the thin man, usually silent, would, very gently expressing astonishment, venture to ask the source of Miss Boundrish's information. "Oh, it's perfectly true, Mr. Welbourne," the overbearing treble would scream down the table, "I had it from a man who had been in the French army himself. The frogs are those little green things in the tanks, that are beginning to make such a croaking every night. Of course, you know that Mont Agel is _terrain militaire_, where nobody is allowed to go for fear of disturbing these frogs, which are kept in tanks on purpose. The diet is so stimulating, you know, it makes the soldiers long to fight." "Really?" the thin man would murmur pensively. "How very interesting! What a remarkably ingenious people the French are! Would such an idea ever occur to the dull British brain, do you suppose?" Then a smile would go round the table, and coughs and suppressed chokings would be heard, and M. Isidore would dance with rapture in the corridor outside, and, on being severely interrogated by Ermengarde and the thin man afterwards, would truthfully say that he only asked Mademoiselle if she had heard of this curious custom of dieting on frogs for courage, and with regard to Mont Agel had chanced to mention that the public were excluded from that, as from all terrain militaire, and that many tanks containing frogs were there, as everywhere in the hills.