r way to the manoeuvres. They were troops
of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through
the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they
took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some of them were
smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a
serving-maid on the sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a
citizen who had given him a mistaken direction. The shame of the erring
man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was
not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used
them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round
on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them
amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge
spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way
to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St.
Gumpertus. The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed
to be also a fair, with peasants' clothes and local pottery for sale,
as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old
women squatting before them. It was all as picturesque as the markets
used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding
journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back
to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window
as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back. Her laugh
reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how
freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid.
When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil
the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and
made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the
street under their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a
corseted officer's, from time to time came out of the house across the
way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk
there. Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and
disappeared with them in-doors. Once she paused from her work to joke
with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in
her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched