t her with infinite
tenderness, assuring her of her safety and regretting her peril in the
same breath. It was perhaps right that he should finally possess himself
of her gloved hand and a seat beside her on the sofa; but it certainly
was highly improper for him to be in the very act of possessing himself
of _both_ hands when--boom, _whiz_, BANG!

We all sprang to our feet. A shell had crashed into the house and
exploded in the room above us. Bushels of plaster fell among us. That
modest and murmurous young lady sprang erect.

"Jumping Jee-rusalem!" she cried.

Haberton, who had also risen, stood as one petrified--as a statue of
himself erected on the site of his assassination. He neither spoke, nor
moved, nor once took his eyes off the face of Orderly Arman, who was now
flinging his girl-gear right and left, exposing his charms in the most
shameless way; while out upon the night and away over the lighted camps
into the black spaces between the hostile lines rolled the billows of
our inexhaustible laughter! Ah, what a merry life it was in the old
heroic days when men had not forgotten how to laugh!

Haberton slowly came to himself. He looked about the room less blankly;
then by degrees fashioned his visage into the sickliest grin that ever
libeled all smiling. He shook his head and looked knowing.

"You can't fool _me_!" he said.

CURRIED COW

My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had
a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one,
for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and
production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of
kicking. She would kick all day and get up in the middle of the night to
kick. She would kick at anything--hens, pigs, posts, loose stones, birds
in the air and fish leaping out of the water; to this impartial and
catholic-minded beef, all were equal--all similarly undeserving. Like
old Timotheus, who "raised a mortal to the skies," was my Aunt
Patience's cow; though, in the words of a later poet than Dryden, she
did it "more harder and more frequently." It was pleasing to see her
open a passage for herself through a populous barnyard. She would flash
out, right and left, first with one hind-leg and then with the other,
and would sometimes, under favoring conditions, have a considerable
number of domestic animals in the air at once.

Her kicks, too, were as admirable in quality as ine