“I do.”
“Is there mony o’ your mak’ i’ your country?” inquired Joe, as he folded up his temporary bed, and put it away.
“In my country! Which is my country?”
“Why, France—isn’t it?”
“Not it, indeed! The circumstance of the French having seized Antwerp, where I was born, does not make me a Frenchman.”
“Holland, then?”
“I am not a Dutchman: now you are confounding Antwerp with Amsterdam.”
“Flanders?”
“I scorn the insinuation, Joe! I, a Flamand! Have I a Flemish face?—the clumsy nose standing out—the mean forehead falling back—the pale blue eyes ‘à fleur de tête?’ Am I all body and no legs, like a Flamand? But you don’t know what they are like—those Netherlanders. Joe—I’m an Anversois: my mother was an Anversoise, though she came of French lineage, which is the reason I speak French.”
“But your father war Yorkshire, which maks ye a bit Yorkshire too; and onybody may see ye’re akin to us, ye’re so keen o’ making brass, and getting forrards.”
“Joe, you’re an impudent dog; but I’ve always been accustomed to a boorish sort of insolence from my youth up: the ‘classe ouvrière’—that is, the working people, in Belgium—bear themselves brutally
