“How big a portion does your daughter want?”

M. Nioche stared, as if he wondered what was coming next; but he promptly recovered himself, at a venture, and replied that he knew a very nice young man, employed by an insurance company, who would content himself with fifteen thousand francs.

“Let your daughter paint half a dozen pictures for me, and she shall have her dowry.”

“Half a dozen pictures—­her dowry!  Monsieur is not speaking inconsiderately?”

“If she will make me six or eight copies in the Louvre as pretty as that Madonna, I will pay her the same price,” said Newman.

Poor M. Nioche was speechless a moment, with amazement and gratitude, and then he seized Newman’s hand, pressed it between his own ten fingers, and gazed at him with watery eyes.  “As pretty as that?  They shall be a thousand times prettier—­they shall be magnificent, sublime.  Ah, if I only knew how to paint, myself, sir, so that I might lend a hand!  What can I do to thank you?  Voyons!” And he pressed his forehead while he tried to think of something.

“Oh, you have thanked me enough,” said Newman.

“Ah, here it is, sir!” cried M. Nioche.  “To express my gratitude, I will charge you nothing for the lessons in French conversation.”

“The lessons?  I had quite forgotten them.  Listening to your English,” added Newman, laughing, “is almost a lesson in French.”

“Ah, I don’t profess to teach English, certainly,” said M. Nioche.  “But for my own admirable tongue I am still at your service.”

“Since you are here, then,” said Newman, “we will begin.  This is a very good hour.  I am going to have my coffee; come every morning at half-past nine and have yours with me.”

“Monsieur offers me my coffee, also?” cried M. Nioche.  “Truly, my beaux jours are coming back.”

“Come,” said Newman, “let us begin.  The coffee is almighty hot.  How do you say that in French?”

Every day, then, for the following three weeks, the minutely respectable figure of M. Nioche made its appearance, with a series of little inquiring and apologetic obeisances, among the aromatic fumes of Newman’s morning beverage.  I don’t know how much French our friend learned, but, as he himself said, if the attempt did him no good, it could at any rate do him no harm.  And it amused him; it gratified that irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation, and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers.  He had notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been assured, and his judgment approved the advice, that in traveling abroad it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country.  M. Nioche was very much of a native and, though his life might