nize Honore. Was not that he, that poor wretch whose left eye
had been destroyed? No! Perhaps that one with the fractured jaw was he?
The one thing certain to her mind was that if she did not make haste to
find him, wherever he might be on that boundless, indeterminate plateau,
they would pick him up and bury him in a common grave with the others.
She therefore hurried to rejoin Prosper, who had gone on to the
farmhouse with the cart.

"_Mon Dieu!_ how is it that you are not better informed? Where is the
place? Ask the people, question them."

There were none but Prussians at the farm, however, together with a
woman servant and her child, just come in from the woods, where they
had been near perishing of thirst and hunger. The scene was one of
patriarchal simplicity and well-earned repose after the fatigues of
the last few days. Some of the soldiers had hung their uniforms from
a clothes-line and were giving them a thorough brushing, another was
putting a patch on his trousers, with great neatness and dexterity,
while the cook of the detachment had built a great fire in the middle
of the courtyard on which the soup was boiling in a huge pot from
which ascended a most appetizing odor of cabbage and bacon. There is no
denying that the Prussians generally displayed great moderation toward
the inhabitants of the country after the conquest, which was made the
easier to them by the spirit of discipline that prevailed among the
troops. These men might have been taken for peaceable citizens just come
in from their daily avocations, smoking their long pipes. On a bench
beside the door sat a stout, red-bearded man, who had taken up the
servant's child, a little urchin five or six years old, and was dandling
it and talking baby-talk to it in German, delighted to see the little
one laugh at the harsh syllables which it could not understand.

Prosper, fearing there might be more trouble in store for them, had
turned his back on the soldiers immediately on entering, but those
Prussians were really good fellows; they smiled at the little donkey,
and did not even trouble themselves to ask for a sight of the pass.

Then ensued a wild, aimless scamper across the bosom of the great,
sinister plain. The sun, now sinking rapidly toward the horizon, showed
its face for a moment from between two clouds. Was night to descend and
surprise them in the midst of that vast charnel-house? Another
shower came down; the sun was obscured, the rain a