toils. The Place de l'Eglise was evacuated,
the troops fell back from street to street; soon the broad avenue was
emptied of its defenders. Women shrieked and sobbed, men swore and shook
their fists at the retiring troops, furious to see themselves abandoned
thus. Many shut themselves in their houses, resolved to die in their
defense.

"Well, _I_ am not going to give up the ship!" shouted Weiss, beside
himself with rage. "No! I will leave my skin here first. Let them come
on! let them come and smash my furniture and drink my wine!"

Wrath filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, a wild, fierce
desire to fight, to kill, at the thought that the hated foreigner should
enter his house, sit in his chair, drink from his glass. It wrought
a change in all his nature; everything that went to make up his
daily life--wife, business, the methodical prudence of the small
bourgeois--seemed suddenly to become unstable and drift away from him.
And he shut himself up in his house and barricaded it, he paced the
empty apartments with the restless impatience of a caged wild beast,
going from room to room to make sure that all the doors and windows
were securely fastened. He counted his cartridges and found he had forty
left, then, as he was about to give a final look to the meadows to see
whether any attack was to be apprehended from that quarter, the sight
of the hills on the left bank arrested his attention for a moment.
The smoke-wreaths indicated distinctly the position of the Prussian
batteries, and at the corner of a little wood on la Marfee, over the
powerful battery at Frenois, he again beheld the group of uniforms, more
numerous than before, and so distinct in the bright sunlight that by
supplementing his spectacles with his binocle he could make out the gold
of their epaulettes and helmets.

"You dirty scoundrels, you dirty scoundrels!" he twice repeated,
extending his clenched fist in impotent menace.

Those who were up there on la Marfee were King William and his staff. As
early as seven o'clock he had ridden up from Vendresse, where he had
had quarters for the night, and now was up there on the heights, out of
reach of danger, while at his feet lay the valley of the Meuse and the
vast panorama of the field of battle. Far as the eye could reach, from
north to south, the bird's-eye view extended, and standing on the summit
of the hill, as from his throne in some colossal opera box, the monarch
surveyed the scene.

I