He was loved in his house and respected in his village; but there was something in the beak of his nose and the brightness of his eye which was apt to make those around him afraid of him.

And indeed Michel Voss could lose his temper and become an angry man.
Our landlord had been twice married.

By his first wife he had now living a single son, George Voss, who at the time of our tale had already reached his twenty-fifth year.

George, however, did not at this time live under his father's roof, having taken service for a time with the landlady of another inn at Colmar.

George Voss was known to be a clever young man; many in those parts declared that he was much more so than his father; and when he became clerk at the Poste in Colmar, and after a year or two had taken into his hands almost the entire management of that house--so that people began to say that old-fashioned and wretched as it was, money might still be made there--people began to say also that Michel Voss had been wrong to allow his son to leave Granpere.