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 travelling 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 not be particularly worth looking into, he was a palpable and
smoothly-rounded unit in that picturesque Parisian civilisation which offered
our hero so much easy entertainment and propounded so many curious problems to
his inquiring and practical mind. Newman was fond of statistics;