the last sou was spent, the last drop of blood shed.

"Bah!" said the doctor in conclusion as he arose to go, "I have many
a time given up a patient, and a week later found him as lively as a
cricket."

Jean smiled. "Doctor, hurry up and make a well man of me, so I can go
back to my post down yonder."

But those evil tidings left Henriette and him in a terribly disheartened
state. There came another cold wave, with snow, and when the next day
Henriette came in shivering from the hospital she told her friend that
Gutman was dead. The intense cold had proved fatal to many among the
wounded; it was emptying the rows of beds. The miserable man whom the
loss of his tongue had condemned to silence had lain two days in the
throes of death. During his last hour she had remained seated at his
bedside, unable to resist the supplication of his pleading gaze. He
seemed to be speaking to her with his tearful eyes, trying to tell, it
may be, his real name and the name of the village, so far away, where a
wife and little ones were watching for his return. And he had gone
from them a stranger, known of none, sending her a last kiss with his
uncertain, stiffening fingers, as if to thank her once again for all
her gentle care. She was the only one who accompanied the remains to the
cemetery, where the frozen earth, the unfriendly soil of the stranger's
country, rattled with a dull, hollow sound on the pine coffin, mingled
with flakes of snow.

The next day, again, Henriette said upon her return at evening:

"'Poor boy' is dead." She could not keep back her tears at mention
of his name. "If you could but have seen and heard him in his pitiful
delirium! He kept calling me: 'Mamma! mamma!' and stretched his poor
thin arms out to me so entreatingly that I had to take him on my lap.
His suffering had so wasted him that he was no heavier than a boy of
ten, poor fellow. And I held and soothed him, so that he might die in
peace; yes, I held him in my arms, I whom he called his mother and who
was but a few years older than himself. He wept, and I myself could not
restrain my tears; you can see I am weeping still--" Her utterance
was choked with sobs; she had to pause. "Before his death he murmured
several times the name which he had given himself: 'Poor boy, poor boy!'
Ah, how just the designation! poor boys they are indeed, some of them
so young and all so brave, whom your hateful war maims and mangles and
causes to suffer so before they a