knew, of course, where she was piously engaged.

The next morning, Madame Lesperon, a regular reader of the newspapers in
expectation of the announcement of her poems having at last been
commended by the Académie, came up to the sick-room with the _Debats_.

"Ah, sly puss," said she, with a smile, "let me congratulate you. One
can know now why you were so close about your husband's mysterious
project. Rejoice, dear, for all France rejoices with you."

Césarine stared all her wonder. The newspapers trumpeting her husband's
name and not in the satirical tone in which the people hail a disaster
to a George Dandin.

"The privately appointed committee which has been for some weeks
thoroughly investigating the marvelous invention--a revolution in
truth--in gunnery, at the Villa Reine-Claude, Montmorency, have
deposited a preliminary report at the Ministry of War. We are not at
liberty to state more than the prodigious result. On a miniature scale,
but which could be enlarged from millimètres to miles without, we are
assured, affecting the demonstration, it has been proved that the new
gun will throw solid shot twelve miles and its special shell nearly
fifteen. The model target was a row of pegs representing piles strongly
driven into clay, a little apart, with the interstices filled with racks
of stones. Two of the new-shaped projectiles dropped on this mark, left
not enough wood to make a match and enough stone to strike a light upon
it, while not a splinter of the missile could be found. Judge what would
happen if they had fallen on a regiment or into a city. Thanks to the
unremitting devotion of this son of France, his country can regard with
complacency the monstrous preparations for unprovoked war which a rival