years of age, who interrupted his song from
time to time to reassemble the members of his flock with heavy blows
from his whip, thus uniting temporal cares with those of a spiritual
nature with a coolness which the most important personages might have
envied him.

"Which of these roads leads to Bergenheim?" called out the traveller
when they were near enough to speak to each other.

"Bergenheim!" repeated the child, taking off his cotton cap, which was
striped like a rainbow, and adding a few words in an unintelligible
Gallo-Germanic patois.

"You are not French, then?" asked the stranger, in a disappointed tone.

The shepherd raised his head proudly and replied:

"I am Alsatian, not French!"

The young man smiled at this trait of local patriotism so common then
in the beautiful province by the Rhine; then he thought that pantomime
might be necessary, so he pointed with his finger first at one road,
then at the other:

"There or there, Bergenheim?" asked he.

The child, in his turn, pointed silently with the tip of his whip to the
banks of the river, designating, at some distance on the other side, a
thicket of woods behind which a slight column of smoke was rising.

"The deuce!" murmured the stranger, "it seems that I have gone
astray; if the chateau is on the other side, where can I establish my
ambuscade?"

The shepherd seemed to understand the traveller's embarrassment. Gazing
at him with his intelligent blue eyes, he traced, with the tip of his
toe in the middle of the road, a furrow across which he rounded his whip
like the arch of a bridge; then he pointed a second time up the river.

"You are an honor to your country, young fellow," exclaimed the
stranger; "there is the material in you to make one of Cooper's
redskins." As he said these words he threw a piece of money into the
child's cap and walked rapidly away in the direction indicated.

The Alsatian stood motionless for a few moments with one hand in his
blond hair and his eyes fastened upon the piece of silver which shone
like a star in the bottom of his cap; when the one whom he considered as
a model of extraordinary generosity had disappeared behind the trees, he
gave vent to his joy by heavy blows from his whip upon the backs of
the cattle, then he resumed his way, singing in a still more triumphant
tone: 'Mantes exultaverunt ut arites', and jumping higher himself than
all the hills and rams in the Bible.

The young man had not walked mor