e tried every way of amusing ourselves; the idlers played at
_drogue_[1], the younger ones drank. We had also a game called "Cat
and Rat," which we played in front of the barracks. A stake was
planted in the ground, to which two cords were fastened; the rat held
one of these, and the cat the other. Their eyes were bandaged. The
cat was armed with a cudgel and tried to catch the rat, who kept out of
the way as much as he could, listening for the cat's approach--thus
they kept going around on tiptoe, and exhibiting their cunning to the
company.

[1] A game at cards, played among soldiers, in which the loser wears a
forked stick on his nose till he wins again.

Zimmer told me that in former times the good Germans came in crowds to
see this game, and you could hear them laugh half a league off when the
cat touched the rat with his club. But times were indeed changed;
every one passed by now without even turning their heads; we only lost
our labor when we tried to interest them in our favor.

During the six weeks we remained at Rosenthal, Zimmer and I often
wandered through the city to kill time. We went by way of the faubourg
of Randstatt and pushed as far as Lindenau, on the road to Lutzen.
There were nothing but bridges, swamps and wooded islets as far as the
eye could reach. There we would eat an omelette with bacon at the
tavern of the Carp, and wash it down with a bottle of white wine. They
no longer gave us credit, as after Jena; I believe, on the contrary,
that the innkeeper would have made us pay double and triple, for the
honor of the German Fatherland, if my comrade had not known the price
of eggs and bacon and wine as well as any Saxon among them.

In the evening, when the sun was setting behind the reeds of the Elster
and the Pleisse, we returned to the city accompanied by the mournful
notes of the frogs, which swarm in thousands in the marshes.

Sometimes we would stop with folded arms at the railing of a bridge and
gaze at the old ramparts of Leipzig, its churches, its old ruins, and
its castle of Pleissenbourg, all glowing in the red twilight. The city
runs to a point where the Pleisse and the Partha branch off, and the
rivers meet above. It is in the shape of a fan, the faubourg of Halle
at the handle and the seven other faubourgs spreading off.[2] We gazed
too at the thousand arms of the Elster and the Pleisse, winding like
threads among islands already growing dark in the twilight, altho