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72
BUNKER BEAN

umes. One was full of dreadful caricatures that the English had delighted in. He found this most offensive and closed it quickly. Probably that explained why he had always felt an instinctive antipathy for the English.

"If you re interested in Napoleon things——" said the officious clerk, and Bean went cold. He wondered if the fellow suspected something.

"Not at all, not at all!" he protested, and refused to look at any more books.

He took his print of the coronation, securely wrapped, and went to another store several blocks away. He could get a Napoleon book there, where they wouldn't be suspicious. He found one that looked promising, "Napoleon, Man and Lover," and still another entitled "The Hundred Days." The latter had illustrations of the tomb, which he noted was in Paris. Its architecture impressed him, and his hands trembled as he held the book open. He had been buried with pomp, even with flamboyance. Robber and killer he might have been, but the picture showed a throng of admiring spectators looking down to where the dead colossus was chested, and on the summit of the dome that rounded above that kingly sarcophagus, a discriminating nation had put the cross of Christ in gold.

Let people say what they would! With all this glory of sepulchre there must be something in the man not to be wholly ashamed of.

And yet "Napoleon, Man and Lover," which he read that night, confirmed his first impression that