mean it I did, for look you, A LA
GUERRE C'EST A LA GUERRE, and I am none of your milksops) that, unless
he yielded me the accommodation, I would give him a taste of my steel.

'I would give it thee without any threat, friend,' said the
yellow-haired man meekly, and handed me over his little sack of straw.

He then leaned himself back as comfortably as he could against the
cart, and began repeating, 'Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott,' by which I
concluded that I had got into the company of a parson. With the jolts of
the waggon, and accidents of the journey, various more exclamations and
movements of the passengers showed what a motley company we were. Every
now and then a countryman would burst into tears; a French voice would
be heard to say, 'O mon Dieu!--mon Dieu!' a couple more of the same
nation were jabbering oaths and chattering incessantly; and a certain
allusion to his own and everybody else's eyes, which came from a
stalwart figure at the far corner, told me that there was certainly an
Englishman in our crew.

But I was spared soon the tedium and discomforts of the journey. In
spite of the clergyman's cushion, my head, which was throbbing with
pain, was brought abruptly in contact with the side of the waggon; it
began to bleed afresh: I became almost light-headed. I only recollect
having a draught of water here and there; once stopping at a fortified
town, where an officer counted us:--all the rest of the journey was
passed in a drowsy stupor, from which, when I awoke, I found myself
lying in a hospital bed, with a nun in a white hood watching over me.

'They are in sad spiritual darkness,' said a voice from the bed next to
me, when the nun had finished her kind offices and retired: 'they are
in the night of error, and yet there is the light of faith in those poor
creatures.'

It was my comrade of the crimp waggon, his huge broad face looming out
from under a white nightcap, and ensconced in the bed beside.

'What! you there, Herr Pastor?' said I.

'Only a candidate, sir,' answered the white nightcap. 'But, praised be
Heaven! you have come to. You have had a wild time of it. You have been
talking in the English language (with which I am acquainted) of Ireland,
and a young lady, and Mick, and of another young lady, and of a house on
fire, and of the British Grenadiers, concerning whom you sung us parts
of a ballad, and of a number of other matters appertaining, no doubt, to
your personal history.'

'It