Page:Anna Chapin--Half a dozen boys.djvu/327

Rh was listened to with a profound attention that was most gratifying. Ted, as the last speaker, came forward with a smile of calm assurance,  before his name was called. Unrolling his manuscript, which proved to be a single strip of paper about three inches wide and four feet long, he bowed cheerfully to the audience, and  began his theme.

“NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

“Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1768, and died in May, 1821. He was born in Corsica, and was sometimes called ‘the ogre of Corsica,’  after he was dead, and they dared to. He was a very great general and a very bad man, but  he did a few good things. When he was eleven years old, he began going to a military  school, and when he was twenty-eight he was  put at the head of forty thousand men, and he began to beat the enemy right off. In two years, he had won eighteen pitch battles. The way he came to have such a good position was because at Toulon, in a siege, he was the only  man who could point the guns right to have  them go into the city. That made him famous.