the Rhine. The last occasion when the French ruined it, however, was
not in vain-glory, but in impotent malice. They fired it on August 19,
1870, during the horrors of the Strasburg bombardment. It is a town
formed of a single street--But I will enter no further into topographic
details.

[Illustration: BEGGARS AT BALE.]

I entered this town or street in haste, leaving my engineering
acquaintance talking to a Prussian general. The idea had seized me of
writing a line to Hohenfels at Marly, actually dated from the grand
duchy of Baden. Undoubtedly I should reach Marly before my letter, but
the postal mark would be a good proof of the actuality of my wanderings.
Clinging, then, to my childishness, as we do to most of our follies,
with a fidelity which it would be well to imitate in our grave affairs,
and feeling pressed for time, I looked eagerly around for a
resting-place where I could procure ink and paper, and entered at the
sign of the "Stork." I found a smoky crowd, peasants and military,
sucking German pipes and drinking from a variety of glasses, pots,
syphons and jugs. I had taken up my pen when an individual by my side,
at the next table, said to his opposite neighbor, "The French will
hardly take Strasburg again by surprise, as they did two centuries ago."

[Illustration: HOW THINGS FELL OUT.]

"It was not the French who took Strasburg," replied the _vis-a-vis_,
evidently a native: "it was _the little urchin in yellow_."

The expression, joined to what I had just heard in the carriage, was
sufficient to attract my attention. My neighbor, a Belgian by his
accent, opened his eyes. The man opposite, perceiving that he had more
than one auditor, narrated at length, in substance and detail, not the
fairy legend of the Alsatians, but accurately and to my amusement, the
historical anecdote which I had imagined to be wrapped up in that tale.
So then, while he spoke, I wrote--no longer to Hohenfels, but to my own
consciousness and memory--these little notes on Chamillo, or rather
Chamilly, and obtained a trifling contribution to the back-stairs
history of the Grand Nation.

"The marquis of Chamilly, afterward marshal of France, was often
promised a good place for a young nephew he had by the powerful
Minister de Louvois. Each time, however, that the youth presented
himself the experienced minister said, 'Bide your time, young man: I see
nothing yet on the horizon worthy of you.' The boy sulked in the
tortures of