[1] Count.

A cup of coffee was smoking on a small inlaid table, which was
stained with liquors burnt by cigars, notched by the penknife of
the victorious officer, who occasionally would stop while
sharpening a pencil, to jot down figures, or to make a drawing on
it, just as it took his fancy.

When he had read his letters and the German newspapers, which his
baggage-master had brought him, he got up, and after throwing
three or four enormous pieces of green wood on to the fire--for
these gentlemen were gradually cutting down the park in order to
keep themselves warm--he went to the window. The rain was
descending in torrents, a regular Normandy rain, which looked as
if it were being poured out by some furious hand, a slanting
rain, which was as thick as a curtain, and which formed a kind of
wall with oblique stripes, and which deluged everything, a
regular rain, such as one frequently experiences in the
neighborhood of Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.

For a long time the officer looked at the sodden turf, and at the
swollen Andelle beyond it, which was overflowing its banks, and
he was drumming a waltz from the Rhine on the window-panes, with
his fingers, when a noise made him turn round; it was his second
in command, Captain Baron von Kelweinstein.

The major was a giant, with broad shoulders, and a long, fair
beard, which hung like a cloth on to his chest. His whole, solemn
person suggested the idea of a military peacock, a peacock who