A TALE OF THE CONSCRIPTION.


One afternoon, some years ago, I was walking along a narrow old road
which leads from Le Crotay, a fishing-village in Picardy, to the town
of St. Valéry-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of
those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in
league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering,
presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray,
relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which would at moments,
as though flying the fury of a raging storm, roll pell-mell through
the air like an army in rout, pouring down at the same time through
the thick, black fog that covered land and sea like a pall a deluge of
cold, heavy water, which occasional blasts of a violent north-west
wind would lash into whistling, pelting and drenching gusts. It was
wretched weather; and how I came to be out in it I am sure I forget;
but perhaps it was that the morning had been a bright one, and that,
beguiled by the clear winter sun, which threw its will-o'-the-wisp
rays on my table like gold-edged invitation cards to be stirring, I
had set out joyously in hopes of a good bracing walk on the hard,
frost-dried roads, which, seen from my windows, gleamed smooth and
glistening as white marble, or, again, in expectation of a gay stroll
through the crisp, clean snow which draped the fields with its downy
folds and reflected the morning light in opal tints like the glossy
satin of a wedding-dress.

But in any case, and whatever may have been my reasons for so doing,