ed with Gruyere
cheese, which he was supposed to be going to sell in France. The captain
told the sentinels that he was taking two friends with him to protect his
goods, in case any one should try to rob him, which did not seem an
extraordinary precaution. A Swiss officer seemed to look at the wagon in
a knowing manner, but that was in order to impress his soldiers. In a
word, neither officers nor men could make it out.

"Get up," the captain said to the horses, as he cracked his whip, while
our three men quietly smoked their pipes. I was half suffocated in my
box, which only admitted the air through those holes in front, and at the
same time I was nearly frozen, for it was terribly cold.

"Get up," the captain said again, and the wagon loaded with Gruyere
cheese entered France.

The Prussian lines were very badly guarded, as the enemy trusted to the
watchfulness of the Swiss. The sergeant spoke North German, while our
captain spoke the bad German of the Four Cantons, and so they could not
understand each other. The sergeant, however, pretended to be very
intelligent; and, in order to make us believe that he understood us, they
allowed us to continue our journey; and, after travelling for seven
hours, being continually stopped in the same manner, we arrived at a
small village of the Jura in ruins, at nightfall.

What were we going to do? Our only arms were the captain's whip, our
uniforms our peasants' blouses, and our food the Gruyere cheese. Our sole
wealth consisted in our ammunition, packages of cartridges which we had
stowed away inside some of the large cheeses. We had about a thousand of
them, just two hundred each, but we needed rifles, and they must be
chassepots. Luckily, however, the captain was a bold man of an inventive
mind, and this was the plan that he hit upon:

While three of us remained hidden in a cellar in the abandoned village,
he continued his journey as far as Besancon with the empty wagon and one
man. The town was invested, but one can always make one's way into a town
among the hills by crossing the tableland till within about ten miles of
the walls, and then following paths and ravines on foot. They left their
wagon at Omans, among the Germans, and escaped out of it at night on
foot; so as to gain the heights which border the River Doubs; the next
day they entered Besancon, where there were plenty of chassepots. There
were nearly forty thousand of them left in the arsenal, and General
Rol