e had often narrowly escaped losing his stripes as a
corporal or a sergeant, and he needed all the chance, all the license of
a campaigning life to gain his first epaulet. Firm and brave soldier, he
had passed almost all his life in Algiers at that time when our foot
soldiers wore the high shako, white shoulder-belts and huge
cartridge-boxes. He had had Lamoriciere for commander. The Due de
Nemours, near whom he received his first wound, had decorated him, and
when he was sergeant-major, Pere Bugrand had called him by his name and
pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kader, bearing the
scar of a yataghan stroke on his neck, of one ball in his shoulder and
another in his chest; and notwithstanding absinthe, duels, debts of
play, and almond-eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point of the
bayonet and sabre, his grade of captain in the First Regiment of
Sharp-shooters.

Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--had just retired on his pension, not quite two
thousand francs, which, joined to the two hundred and fifty francs from
his cross, placed him in that estate of honorable penury which the State
reserves for its old servants.

His entry into his natal city was without ostentation. He arrived one
morning on the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an extinguished
cigar, and already on good terms with the conductor, to whom, during his
journey, he had related the passage of the Porte de Fer; full of
indulgence, moreover, for the distractions of his auditor, who often
interrupted the recital by some oath or epithet addressed to the off
mare. When the diligence stopped he threw on the sidewalk his old
valise, covered with railway placards as numerous as the changes of
garrison that its proprietor had made, and the idlers of the
neighborhood were astonished to see a man with a decoration--a rare
thing in the province--offer a glass of wine to the coachman at the bar
of an inn near by.

He installed himself at once. In a house in the outskirts, where two
captive cows lowed, and fowls and ducks passed and repassed through the
gate-way, a furnished chamber was to let. Preceded by a
masculine-looking woman, the Captain climbed the stair-way with its
great wooden balusters, perfumed by a strong odor of the stable, and
reached a great tiled room, whose walls were covered with a bizarre
paper representing, printed in blue on a white background and repeated
infinitely