rer in epoch-making cataclysms. Bismarck, gray, imbittered,
without honour in an unenlightened court, can still smile when he
remembers Jules Favre and his prayer for the National Guard.

And these were the men who formed the convoy around the chariot
of France militant, France in arms!--a cortege at once hideous,
shameful, ridiculous, grotesque.

What was left of the Empire? Metz still held out; Strassbourg
trembled under the shock of Prussian mortars; Paris strained its
eyes for the first silhouette of the Uhlan on the heights of
Versailles; and through the chill of the dying year the sombre
Emperor, hunted, driven, threatened, tumbled into the snare of
Sedan as a sick buzzard flutters exhausted to earth under a
shower of clubs and stones.

The end was to be brutal: a charge or two of devoted men, a crush
at the narrow gates, a white flag, a brusque gesture from
Bismarck, nothing more except a "guard of honour," an imperial
special train, and Belgian newsboys shrieking along the station
platform, "Extra! Fall of the Empire! Paris proclaims the
Republic! Flight of the Empress! Extra!"

Jack, sitting with the paper in his hands, read between the
lines, and knew that the prophecy of evil days would be
fulfilled. But as yet the writing on the wall of Alsatian hills
had not spelled "Sedan," nor did he know of the shambles of
Mars-la-Tour, the bloody work at Buzancy, the retreat from
Chalons, and the evacuation of Vitry.

Buzancy marked the beginning of the end. It was nothing but a
skirmish; the 3d Saxon Cavalry, a squadron or two of the 18th
Uhlans, and Zwinker's Battery fought a half-dozen squadrons of
chasseurs. But the red-letter mark on the result was unmistakable.
Bazaine's correspondence was captured. On the same day the second
sortie occurred from Strassbourg. It was time, for the trenches
and parallels had been pushed within six hundred paces of the
glacis. And so it was everywhere, the whole country was in a
ferment of disorganized but desperate resistance of astonishment,
indignation, dismay.

The nation could not realize that it was too late, that it was
not conquest but invasion which the armies of France must prepare
for. Blow after blow fell, disaster after disaster stunned the
country, while the government studied new and effective forms of
lying and evasion, and the hunted Emperor drifted on to his doom
in the pitfall of Sedan.

All Alsace except Belfort, Strassbourg, Schlettstadt, and Neuf
Bri