“A very great man,” returned John Paul Jones. “It takes a crisis like this present one to bring out the quality of a people; and then the temper of a few is bound to ring true.” The horses upon which they were mounted were good ones and they put the miles behind them rapidly. “This country of France,” observed Captain Jones during the course of the day, “is a fine one, but the people of the peasant class seem an overworked, underfed lot.” “They do indeed,” agreed Ethan. “Look at that group there,” pointing to an aged man, a young woman, apparently his daughter, and a few children, who stood together in a cottage door to see them ride by. “There has been little else but want and gloom in those lives, I’ll venture to say. Freedom is not worshiped here, no matter how much the French say they admire the desire for it in us.” “I always thought,” observed Longsword as they passed a row of miserable huts, “that the poor people of Ireland were the worst housed in the world. But, faith, the French beat them. Sure a Galway beggar would turn up the nose of him at a house like one of those.” “The people seem to lack spirit, too,” observed Ethan. “They are sullen and lowering in their looks sometimes, but they have the appearance of having given up all hope of betterment, long ago.” “I don’t think they ever possessed even the shadow of a hope,” said the captain, “nor their fathers nor grandfathers before them, for that matter. However, a betterment will come some day; and then let the gilded idlers, who crushed this people into the earth and brutalized them so, beware! That day will dawn red, I think, and will leave a gory mark upon the pages of history.” Evening had already come on when they halted at an inn and applied for accommodations. The landlord was a small ferret of a man with a furtive manner and a sidelong look; he received them with smiles, but his little red eyes seemed to be calculating how much they would willingly pay for supper and lodgings. “The groom will take your horses, monsieurs,” fawned he, as a stout looking lout came forward, from a tumble down building with a rotten looking roof of thatch. “He will feed them corn, monsieurs, and give them dry beds and a rubbing that will make them feel like colts.” “I’ve seen better-favored fellows than this spalpeen run away wid a horse before now,” remarked Longsword, who knew no French, and only understood what was being said by the movements of the others. “Do you think we’d better trust them to him, Master Ethan?” “Oh, I suppose so,” said Ethan. “They’ll be safe enough.” “I don’t believe they have a bed in the place that’s fit to sleep on,” grumbled the old dragoon, as they entered the inn. “And look at that little fox of a fellow wid his smirks and his smiles. Faith, I’ll see to me bit of money while I’m here, so I will. I never yet trusted one of these sugary villains that ye meet by the roadside. He may be the biggest thief in all France for all we know.”