fitting shoes, or a soldier deprived of the use of his limbs by straps
and buttons, or a soldier elaborately forced to be self-helpless in all
the small affairs of life. A swarm of brisk, bright, active, bustling,
handy, odd, skirmishing fellows, able to turn cleverly at anything, from
a siege to soup, from great guns to needles and thread, from the
broadsword exercise to slicing an onion, from making war to making
omelets, was all you would have found.

What a swarm! From the Great Place under the eye of Mr. The Englishman,
where a few awkward squads from the last conscription were doing the
goose-step--some members of those squads still as to their bodies, in the
chrysalis peasant-state of Blouse, and only military butterflies as to
their regimentally-clothed legs--from the Great Place, away outside the
fortifications, and away for miles along the dusty roads, soldiers
swarmed. All day long, upon the grass-grown ramparts of the town,
practising soldiers trumpeted and bugled; all day long, down in angles of
dry trenches, practising soldiers drummed and drummed. Every forenoon,
soldiers burst out of the great barracks into the sandy gymnasium-ground
hard by, and flew over the wooden horse, and hung on to flying ropes, and
dangled upside-down between parallel bars, and shot themselves off wooden
platforms,--splashes, sparks, coruscations, showers of soldiers. At
every corner of the town-wall, every guard-house, every gateway, every
sentry-box, every drawbridge, every reedy ditch, and rushy dike,
soldiers, soldiers, soldiers. And the town being pretty well all wall,
guard-house, gateway, sentry-box, drawbridge, reedy ditch, and rushy
dike, the town was pretty well all soldiers.

What would the sleepy old town have been without the soldiers, seeing
that even with them it had so overslept itself as to have slept its
echoes hoarse, its defensive bars and locks and bolts and chains all