"
Just at this point I felt a man hustle me as he passed. One of the
soldiers made a thrust at him, and he turned round. I caught his
eye, and it flashed something to me. It was Voban the barber, who
had shaved me every day for months when I first came, while my arm
was stiff from a wound got fighting the French on the Ohio. It was
quite a year since I had met him, and I was struck by the change in
his face. It had grown much older; its roundness was gone. We had
had many a talk together; he helping me with French, I listening
to the tales of his early life in France, and to the later tale
of a humble love, and of the home which he was fitting up for his
Mathilde, a peasant girl of much beauty, I was told, but whom I had
never seen. I remembered at that moment, as he stood in the crowd
looking at me, the piles of linen which he had bought at Ste. Anne
de Beaupre, and the silver pitcher which his grandfather had got
from the Duc de Valois for an act of merit. Many a time we had
discussed the pitcher and the deed, and fingered the linen, now
talking in French, now in English; for in France, years before, he
had been a valet to an English officer at King Louis's court.
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