arch Noah, sat snoring on his beast, holding on by the tail.
Here is where you can see the advantage of having Frenchmen for your enemies. Germans, Swiss, or English, do their thinking through their fists, and are so thickheaded that it takes them till Christmas to understand what was told them on All Saints' Day. I would not have given a button for poor Pluviaut's chance with such people as these. They would have thought we were playing a joke on them, but no words are necessary between us. If we come from Lorraine, Touraine, Champagne, or Bretagne, geese from Beauce, asses from Beaune, or rabbits from Vézelay, a good joke hits us all in the right spot, no matter how much we may pound and beat each other. When they caught sight of our old Silenus, their whole camp burst out laughing. They laughed all over their faces, with their throats, with all their hearts, and even their stomachs, and by St. Rigobert! to see the way they laughed set us off too, all along our line. Like Ajax, and Hector the Trojan, we hurled gay defiance at each other across the moat. Our remarks, however, had much more snap than theirs. If I were not so busy, I would write them down, but if you can put up with it, I mean to include them in a collection I have been making for the last
