white ship with gigantic American flags painted on her
sides and with an American flag at the stern was unloading horses. They
were for the French artillery and cavalry, but they were so glad to be
free of the ship that their future state did not distress them.

Instead, they kicked joyously, scattering the sentries, who were
jet-black Turcos. As one of them would run from a plunging horse, the
others laughed at him with that contagious laugh of the darky that is
the same all the world over, whether he hails from Mobile or Tangiers,
and he would return sheepishly, with eyes rolling, protesting the horse
was a "boche."

Officers, who looked as though in times of peace they might be gentlemen
jockeys, were receiving the remounts and identifying the brands on the
hoof and shoulder that had been made by their agents in America.

If the veterinary passed the horse, he was again marked, this time with
regimental numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron, and on the flanks
with white paint. In ten days he will be given a set of shoes, and in a
month he will be under fire.

Colonel Count Rene de Montjou, who has been a year in America buying
remounts, and who returned on the _Chicago_, discovered that one of the
horses was a "substitut," and a very bad "substitut" he was. His teeth
had been filed, but the French officers saw that he was all of eighteen
years old.

The young American who, in the interests of the contractor, was checking
off the horses, refused to be shocked. Out of the corner of his thin
lips he whispered confidentially:

"Suppose he is a ringer," he protested; "suppose he is eighteen years
old, what's the use of their making a holler? What's it matter how old
he is, if all they're going to do with him is to get him shot?"

That night at the station, as we waited for the express to Paris, many
recruits were starting for the front. There seemed to be thousands of
them, all new; new sky-blue uniforms, new soup-tureen helmets, new
shoes.

They were splendidly young and vigorous looking, and to the tale that
France now is forced to call out only old men and boys they gave the
lie. With many of them, to say farewell, came friends and family. There
was one group that was all comedy, a handsome young man under thirty,
his mother and a young girl who might have been his wife or sister.

They had brought him food for the journey; chocolate, a long loaf, tins
of sardines, a bottle of wine; and the fun was in try