LITMIR.BIZ

       THE SWORD OF BRENNUS.

      In fact, a picture, pretty well drawn and painted, represented the well known historic incident of Brennus, the chief of the Gallic army, throwing with savage and haughty mien his sword into one of the scales of the balance that held the ransom of Rome, vanquished by our Gallic ancestors, about two thousand and odd years ago.

      At first, the people of the St. Denis quarter derived a good deal of fun from the bellicose sign of the linen draper. In course of time they forgot all about the seemingly incongruous sign in the recognition of the fact that Monsieur Marik Lebrenn was a most admirable man—a good husband, a conscientious father of his family, and a merchant who sold at reasonable prices excellent merchandise, among other things superb Brittany linen, imported from his native province. The worthy tradesman paid his bills regularly; was accommodating and affable towards everybody; and filled, to the great satisfaction of his "dear comrades," the function of captain in the company of grenadiers of his battalion in the National Guard. All told, he was held in general esteem by the people of his quarter, among whom he was justified to consider himself as a notable.

      On the rather chilly morning of February 23, the shutters of the linen draper's shop were as usual removed by the shop-lad, assisted by a female servant, both of whom were Bretons like their master, Monsieur Lebrenn, who was in the habit of taking all his attendants, clerks as well as domestic servitors, from his own country.

      The maid, a fresh and comely lass of twenty years, was named Jeanike. The lad who tended the shop was called Gildas Pakou. He was a robust youngster from the region of Vannes, whose open countenance bore the impress of wonderment, seeing he was only two days in Paris. He spoke French quite passably; but in his conversations with Jeanike, his "country-woman," he preferred the idiom of lower Brittany, the old Gallic tongue that our ancestors spoke before the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar.[1]

      Gildas Pakou seemed preoccupied, although busy carrying to the interior of the shop the shutters that he removed from the outside. He even paused for a moment in the middle of the shop, and, leaning both his arms and his chin upon the edge of one of the boards that he had unfastened, seemed profoundly steeped in thought.

      "What are you brooding over, Gildas?" inquired Jeanike.

      "Lassy," he answered in his Breton tongue, and with a distant and almost comical look, "do you remember the song of our country—Genevieve and Rustefan?"[2]

      "Sure! I was sung to sleep in my cradle with it. It starts this way:

      "When little John led his sheep out to pasture,

       He then little thought that a priest he would be."

      "Well, Jeanike, I am like little John. When I was at Vannes I little dreamed of what I was to see in Paris."

      "And what do you find so startling in Paris, Gildas?"

      "Everything, Jeanike."

      "Indeed!"

      "And a good many other things, besides!"

      "That's a good many."

      "Now listen. Mother said to me: 'Gildas, Monsieur Lebrenn, our countryman, to whom I sell the linen that we weave in the evenings, takes you as an assistant in his shop. His is a home of the good God. You, who are neither bold nor venturesome, will find yourself there as comfortable as here in our little town. St. Denis Street in Paris, where your employer lives, is a street inhabited only by honest and peaceful merchants.' Well, now, Jeanike, no later than yesterday evening, the second day after my arrival, did you not hear cries of: 'Close the shops! Close the shops!' And did you not thereupon see the night-patrols, and hear the drums and the hurried steps of large numbers of men who came and went tumultuously? There were among them some whose faces were frightful to behold, with their long beards. I positively dreamed of them, Jeanike! I did!"

      "Poor Gildas!"

      "And if that were only all!"

      "What! Is there still more? Have you, perchance, anything to blame our master for?"

      "Him? He is the best man in all the world. I'm quite sure of that. Mother told me so."

      "Or Madam Lebrenn?"

      "The dear, good woman! She reminds me of my own mother with her

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