ngth of his young voice, "Don't
come on! They are here!" Then he fell backwards, pierced by four balls,
but his comrades were saved!

LXI.

Another, and a sadder scene happened in the Avenue des Ternes. A
funeral procession was passing along. The coffin, borne by two men, was
very small, the coffin of a young child. The father, a workman in a
blouse, walked behind with a little knot of other mourners. A sad sight,
but the catastrophe was horrible. Suddenly a shell from Mont Valerien
fell on the tiny coffin, and, bursting, scattered the remains of the
dead child upon the living father. The corpse was entirely destroyed,
with the trappings that had surrounded it. Massacring the dead! Truly
those cannons are a wonderful, a refined invention!

LXII.

At last the unhappy inhabitants of Neuilly are able to leave their
cellars. For three weeks, they have been hourly expecting the roofs of
their houses to fall in and crush them; and with much difficulty have
managed during the quieter moments of the day to procure enough to keep
them from dying of starvation. For three weeks they have endured all the
terrors, all the dangers of battle and bombardment. Many are dead--they
all thought themselves sure to die. Horrible details are told. A little
past Gilet's restaurant, where the omnibus office used to be, lived an
old couple, man and wife. At the beginning of the civil war, two shells
burst, one after another, in their poor lodging, destroying every
article of furniture. Utterly destitute, they took refuge in the cellar,
where after a few hours of horrible suspense, the old man died. He was
seventy, and the fright killed him; his wife was younger and stronger,
and survived. In the rare intervals between the firing she went out and
spoke to her neighbours through the cellar gratings--"My husband is
dead. He must be buried; what am I to do?"--Carrying him to the
cemetery was of course out of the question; no one could have been found
to render this mournful duty. Besides, the bearers would probably have
met a shell or a bullet on the way, and then others must have been found
to carry them. One day, the old woman ventured as far as the Porte
Maillot, and cried out as loud as she could, "My husband is dead in a
cellar; come and fetch him, and let us both through the gates!"--The
sentinel facetiously (let us hope it was nothing worse) took aim at her
with his rifle, and she fled back to her cellar. At night, she sle