CHAPTER III.
CAPITAINE LEMAITRE.
He was one of those men that might be any age,--thirty, forty, forty-five; there was no telling from his face what was years and what was only weather.

His countenance was of a grave and quiet, but also luminous, sort, which was instantly admired and ever afterward remembered, as was also the fineness of his hair and the blueness of his eyes.

Those pronounced him youngest who scrutinized his face the closest.

But waiving the discussion of age, he was odd, though not with the oddness that he who reared him had striven to produce.
He had not been brought up by mother or father.

He had lost both in infancy, and had fallen to the care of a rugged old military grandpa of the colonial school, whose unceasing endeavor had been to make "his boy" as savage and ferocious a holder of unimpeachable social rank as it became a pure-blooded French Creole to be who could trace his pedigree back to the god Mars.
"Remember, my boy," was the adjuration received by him as regularly as his waking cup of black coffee, "that none of your family line ever kept the laws of any government or creed." And if it was well that he should bear this in mind, it was well to reiterate it persistently, for, from the nurse's arms, the boy wore a look, not of docility so much as of gentle, _judicial_ benevolence.