The coachman, who had been drinking, said that his God was the sun; in fact, he, like the elephants, adored the sun! Suddenly some one asked how he knew that elephants adored the sun.
“I saw it once in a photograph,” said he, sternly. Upon which Mademoiselle Constant vehemently accused him of impiety and atheism; while the cook, a stout Picardian with true peasant shrewdness, told them to be quiet.
“Hush!” she said; “you should never quarrel over your religions.”
And Jack—what was he doing all this time?
At the end of the table, stupefied by the heat and the interminable discussions of these brutes, he slept, with his head on his arms, and his fair curls spread over his velvet sleeves. In his unrestful slumber he heard the hum of the servants’ voices, and at last he fancied that they were talking of him; but the voices seemed to reach from afar off—through a fog, as it were.
“Who is he, then?” asked the cook.
“I don’t know,” answered Constant; “but one thing is certain, he can’t remain here, and she wishes me to find a school for him.”
Between a yawn and a hiccough, the coachman spoke,—
“I know a capital school, and one that will, just answer your purpose. It is called the Moronval College—no, not college—but the Moronval Academy. But what of that? it is a college all the same. I put my child there once, when I was ordered off with the Egyptian army. The grocer gave me the prospectus, and I think I have it still.”
He looked in his portfolio, and from among the tumbled and soiled papers he extracted one, dirtier even than the others.