“An animal more timid than a hare?” replied the colonel thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said my father.
“By Jove, certainly!” answered the colonel, “a frog is more cowardly, because in the old fable of La Fontaine we are told that the frogs were afraid of a hare.”
“Very well,” said my father, pointing at me with the newspaper, “there you see a frog then; I have only to put him in a glass bottle with a little ladder, to act as a barometer,” and as he uttered these words, he looked at me with a vexed and mortified expression, and made me a sign to go out of the room.
The colonel looked at me, with his great round eyes wide open, and making a slight grimace, asked, “Is he——”
“Good gracious! yes,” replied my father with a deep sigh. The colonel whistled softly, as he looked at my father, and he rolled his eyes back to me with an astonished expression in them, pretended or real. This warlike man felt surprised, apparently, to find a coward in the son of a brother-in-arms. All the time he stared at me I did not dare to move.
At last he shook his head several times and said, grinding his teeth the while, “You know, Bicquerot, I belong to the old school. For such fancies as these (for they are pure fancies), I know but of one remedy,” and he made suggestive and disagreeable movements with his cane as if chastising an imaginary coward.
“Oh, no!” my father answered quickly, “no, the remedy would be worse than the malady. And think, too, of his mother: she, the poor dear mother, would go mad. No! no! certainly not.”