So, with the occasional interruptions, he was practising his amazing French upon Arsene.
Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden was of old Massachusetts stock. He had learned the French that was taught at Harvard in the fifties. Afterwards, after his conversion to the Catholic Church, he had gone to Louvain for his seminary studies. There he had heard French of another kind. But to the day he died he spoke his French just as it was written in the book, and with an aggressive New England accent.
He must speak French to the children in French Village to-morrow, not because the children would understand, but because it would please Father Ponfret and the parents.
They were struggling around the shoulder of Lansing Mountain and the Bishop was rounding out an elegant period to the bewildered admiration of Arsene, when the latter broke in with a sharp:
“Jomp, M’sieur l’Eveque, jomp!”
The Bishop jumped––or was thrown––ten feet into a snow-bank.
While he gathered himself out of the snow and felt carefully his bulging breast pockets to make sure that everything was safe, he saw what had happened.
The star-faced pony on the near side had slipped off the trail and rolled down a little bank, dragging the other pony and Arsene and the sled with him. It looked like a bad jumble of ponies, man and sled at the bottom of a little gully, and as the Bishop floundered through the snow to help he feared that it was serious.
Arsene, his body pinned deep in the snow under the sled, his head just clear of the ponies’ heels, was talking wisely and craftily to them in the patois that they understood. He was within inches of having his brains beaten out by the quivering hoofs; he could not, literally, move his head to save his life, and he talked and reasoned with them as quietly as if he stood at their heads.