r life,
with head and shoulders down. When they were safely ensconced behind a
stack that opportunely offered its protection at the end of their course
and turned to look behind them, they beheld another shell come rushing
through the air and alight upon the shed at the very spot they had
occupied so lately. The crash was fearful; the shed was knocked to
splinters. The little ragamuffin considered that a capital joke, and
fairly danced with glee.

"Bravo, hit 'em agin! that's the way to do it!--But it was time for us
to skip, though, wasn't it?"

But again Henriette struck up against insurmountable obstacles in the
shape of hedges and garden-walls, that offered absolutely no outlet. Her
irrepressible companion, still wearing his broad grin and remarking that
where there was a will there was a way, climbed to the coping of a wall
and assisted her to scale it. On reaching the further side they found
themselves in a kitchen garden among beds of peas and string-beans and
surrounded by fences on every side; their sole exit was through the
little cottage of the gardener. The boy led the way, swinging his arms
and whistling unconcernedly, with an expression on his face of most
profound indifference. He pushed open a door that admitted him to a
bedroom, from which he passed on into another room, where there was an
old woman, apparently the only living being upon the premises. She was
standing by a table, in a sort of dazed stupor; she looked at the two
strangers who thus unceremoniously made a highway of her dwelling, but
addressed them no word, nor did they speak a word to her. They vanished
as quickly as they had appeared, emerging by the exit opposite their
entrance upon an alley that they followed for a moment. After that there
were other difficulties to be surmounted, and thus they went on for more
than half a mile, scaling walls, struggling through hedges, availing
themselves of every short cut that offered, it might be the door of
a stable or the window of a cottage, as the exigencies of the case
demanded. Dogs howled mournfully; they had a narrow escape from being
run down by a cow that was plunging along, wild with terror. It seemed
as if they must be approaching the village, however; there was an odor
of burning wood in the air, and momentarily volumes of reddish smoke,
like veils of finest gauze floating in the wind, passed athwart the sun
and obscured his light.

All at once the urchin came to a halt and planted