It was some comfort, anyhow, to find that none of the crowd understood the foreign language any better than the children did.
“What's that he's saying?” asked the farmer, heavily.
“Sounds like French to me,” said the Station Master, who had once been to Boulogne for the day.
“It isn't French!” cried Peter.
“What is it, then?” asked more than one voice. The crowd fell back a little to see who had spoken, and Peter pressed forward, so that when the crowd closed up again he was in the front rank.
“I don't know what it is,” said Peter, “but it isn't French. I know that.” Then he saw what it was that the crowd had for its centre. It was a man—the man, Peter did not doubt, who had spoken in that strange tongue. A man with long hair and wild eyes, with shabby clothes of a cut Peter had not seen before—a man whose hands and lips trembled, and who spoke again as his eyes fell on Peter.
“No, it's not French,” said Peter.
“Try him with French if you know so much about it,” said the farmer-man.
“Parlay voo Frongsay?” began Peter, boldly, and the next moment the crowd recoiled again, for the man with the wild eyes had left leaning against the wall, and had sprung forward and caught Peter's hands, and begun to pour forth a flood of words which, though he could not understand a word of them, Peter knew the sound of.
“There!” said he, and turned, his hands still clasped in the hands of the strange shabby figure, to throw a glance of triumph at the crowd; “there; THAT'S French.”