"De name? de name? oh! de name is le Harnois; Monsieur le Harnois; he fos Captain au service de Sa Majesté Très Chrétienne."
Bertram started with surprize: but he controlled his astonishment, and attended to what followed from Sir Morgan.
"Well, Mr. Van der Velsen, Frenchman or not, I know of no possible objection to his being decently buried. In the churchyard of Aberkilvie, which lies by the seaside about eighteen miles from this place, there are bodies of all nations--Dutch, English, Danes, Spaniards, and no doubt Frenchmen--flung upon our shores by shipwreck or other accidents of mortality. By all means let the French Captain be honourably interred at Aberkilvie."
"Tank, Sare Morgan, moch tank: bot--bot, Sare, dare is anoder leetle ting."
"And what is that, Sir?"
Here another friend of the deceased stepped forward and briefly stated that Captain le Harnois was a Roman Catholic; and that his son therefore naturally wished to bury him in a Catholic burying-ground.
"But where is there such a burying-ground?" asked Sir Morgan: "I know of none but the chapel of Utragan, where nobody has been buried since the wars of the Two Roses: and now, I am sorry to say, it is used as a potato ground."
"If the lord lieutenant would permit us to carry the deceased so far inland, there is the consecrated ground of Griffith ap Gauvon."
"True: there is Ap Gauvon certainly: I had forgot. Well, be it so: let Captain le Harnois be buried in one of the chapels at Ap Gauvon."
"Tank, Sare, moch tank," said the Dutchman: "but dare is 'noder leetle ting:" and then he explained in substance, that as the Captain had died at sea, all his friends were apprehensive that the officers of the Customs and Excise would insist on searching the hearse and coffin; an indignity which would grievously wound the feelings of his son and all his family; and which could not be viewed in France in any other light than as an insult unworthy of a great and liberal nation to the memory of a brave officer who had the honor to serve His Most Christian Majesty.