'Well, I forgot to tell you about Alphonse. By the way, we'll have him in our service. There was he plucking at me: “Monsieur Henri-Richie, Monsieur Henri-Richie! mille complimens... et les potages, Monsieur!—à la Camérani, à la tortue, aux petits pois... c'est en vrai artiste que j'ai su tout retarder jusqu'au dernier moment.... Monsieur! cher Monsieur Henri-Richie, je vous en supplie, laissez-là, ces planteurs de choux.” And John Thresher, as spokesman for the rest: “Master Harry, we beg to say, in my name, we can't masticate comfortably while we've got a notion Mr. Frenchman he's present here to play his Frenchified tricks with our plain wholesome dishes. Our opinion is, he don't know beef from hedgehog; and let him trim 'em, and egg 'em, and bread-crumb 'em, and pound the mess all his might, and then tak' and roll 'em into balls, we say we wun't, for we can't make English muscle out o' that.”—And Alphonse, quite indifferent to the vulgar: “Hé! mais pensez donc au Papa, Monsieur Henri-Richie, sans doute il a une santé de fer: mais encore faut-il lui ménager le suc gastrique, pancréatique....”'
'Ay, ay!' laughed my father; 'what sets you thinking of Alphonse?'
'I suppose because I shall have to be speaking French in an hour.'
'German, Richie, German.'
'But these Belgians speak French.'
'Such French as it is. You will, however, be engaged in a German conversation first, I suspect.'
'Very well, I'll stumble on. I don't much like it.'
'In six hours from this second of time, Richie, boy, I undertake to warrant you fonder of the German tongue than of any other spoken language.'
I looked at him. He gave me a broad pleasant smile, without sign of a jest lurking in one corner.
The scene attracted me. Laughing fishwife faces radiant with sea-bloom in among the weedy pier-piles, and sombre blue-cheeked officers of the douane, with their double row of buttons extending the breadth of their shoulders. My father won Mr. Peterborough's approval by declaring cigars which he might easily have passed.