conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
a growing tree.

This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the
seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were
longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.

Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
went down the road.

Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.

Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--