article told how the king of Prussia had the diarrhea, and how Bismarck had broken his leg in jumping from the window of an inn where a party of zouaves had just missed capturing him.  Capital news!  Lapoulle laughed over it as if he would split his sides, while Chouteau and the others, without expressing the faintest doubt, chuckled at the idea that soon they would be picking up Prussians as boys pick up sparrows in a field after a hail-storm.  But they laughed loudest at old Bismarck’s accident; oh! the zouaves and the turcos, they were the boys for one’s money!  It was said that the Germans were in an ecstasy of fear and rage, declaring that it was unworthy of a nation that claimed to be civilized to employ such heathen savages in its armies.  Although they had been decimated at Froeschwiller, the foreign troops seemed to have a good deal of life left in them.

It was just striking six from the steeple of the little church of Dontrien when Loubet shouted: 

“Come to supper!”

The squad lost no time in seating themselves in a circle.  At the very last moment Loubet had succeeded in getting some vegetables from a peasant who lived hard by.  That made the crowning glory of the feast:  a soup perfumed with carrots and onions, that went down the throat soft as velvet—­what could they have desired more?  The spoons rattled merrily in the little wooden bowls.  Then it devolved on Jean, who always served the portions, to distribute the beef, and it behooved him that day to do it with the strictest impartiality, for hungry eyes were watching him and there would have been a growl had anyone received a larger piece than his neighbors.  They concluded by licking the porringers, and were smeared with soup up to their eyes.

“Ah, nom de Dieu!” Chouteau declared when he had finished, throwing himself flat on his back; “I would rather take that than a beating, any day!”

Maurice, too, whose foot pained him less now that he could give it a little rest, was conscious of that sensation of well-being that is the result of a full stomach.  He was beginning to take more kindly to his rough companions, and to bring himself down nearer to their level under the pressure of the physical necessities of their life in common.  That night he slept the same deep sleep as did his five tent-mates; they all huddled close together, finding the sensation of animal warmth not disagreeable in the heavy dew that fell.  It is necessary to state that Lapoulle, at the instigation of Loubet, had gone to a stack not far away and feloniously appropriated a quantity of straw, in which our six gentlemen snored as if it had been a bed of down.  And from Auberive to Hentregiville, along the pleasant banks of the Suippe as it meandered sluggishly between its willows, the fires of those hundred thousand sleeping men illuminated the starlit night for fifteen miles, like a long array of twinkling stars.