hem. Please mind your
cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my
hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly,
if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."

"Yes, monsieur," said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a
proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of
antiquities, "that is true. I have often been _tres fache_ to think that
I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycee should have put my name to
that thing over there."[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Deputy.

[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as
related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for
the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to
suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the
investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in
fact."--J.H.M.

XXIV

THE HILL

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to
bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud
and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was
ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was
covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself
was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in
the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole
to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a
thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing
obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of
flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the
velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill
stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig
becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on
a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping
of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke
the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our
feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their
hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The
city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at
it across the pleasa