ere. Will you? Then
hunt up the regiment later. We are to see a little of each other,
are we not, old fellow?"

"Not if you're going Prussian-hunting across the Rhine. When you
come back crowned with bay and laurel and pretzels, you can stop
at Morteyn."

They nodded and clasped hands.

"Au revoir!" laughed Georges. "What shall I bring you from
Berlin?"

"I'm no Herod," replied Jack; "bring back your own feather-head
safely--that's all I ask." And with a smile and a gay salute the
young fellows parted, turning occasionally in their saddles to
wave a last adieu, until Jack's big horse disappeared among the
dense platoons ahead.

For a quarter of an hour he sidled and pushed and shoved, and
picked a cautious path through section after section of field
artillery, seeing here and there an officer whom he knew, saluting
cheerily, making a thousand excuses for his haste to the good-natured
artillerymen, who only grinned in reply. As he rode, he noted with
misgivings that the cannon were not breech-loaders. He had recently
heard a good deal about the Prussian new model for field artillery,
and he had read, in the French journals, reports of their wonderful
range and flat trajectory. The cannon that he passed, with the
exception of the Montigny mitrailleuses and the American gatlings,
were all beautiful pieces, bronzed and engraved with crown and LN
and eagle, but for all their beauty they were only muzzle-loaders.

In a little while he came to the head of the column. The road in
front seemed to be clear enough, and he wondered why they had
halted, blocking half a division of infantry and cavalry behind
them. There really was no reason at all. He did not know it, but
he had seen the first case of that indescribable disease that
raged in France in 1870-71--that malady that cannot be termed
paralysis or apathy or inertia. It was all three, and it was
malignant, for it came from a befouled and degraded court, spread
to the government, infected the provinces, sparing neither prince
nor peasant, until over the whole fair land of France it crept
and hung, a fetid, miasmic effluvia, till the nation, hopeless,
weary, despairing, bereft of nerve and sinew, sank under it into
utter physical and moral prostration.

This was the terrible fever that burned the best blood out of the
nation--a fever that had its inception in the corruption of the
empire, its crisis at Sedan, its delirium in the Commune! The
nation's convalescence