unger officers of the various regiments. La Cigarette, many a time
before the reigning spirit of suppers and carouses, was banqueted with
all the eclat that befitted that cross which sparkled on her blue and
scarlet vest. High throned on a pyramid of knapsacks, canteens, and
rugs, toasted a thousand times in all brandies and red wines that the
stores would yield, sung of in improvised odes that were chanted by
voices which might have won European fame as tenor or as basso, caressed
and sued with all the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and lightly-go love of
the camp, with twice a hundred flashing, darkling eyes bent on her in
the hot admiration that her vain, coquette spirit found delight in,
ruling as she would with jest, and caprice, and command, and bravado
all these men who were terrible as tigers to their foes, the Little One
reigned alone; and--like many who have reigned before her--found lead in
her scepter, dross in her diadem, satiety in her kingdom.

When it was over, this banquet that was all in her honor, and that three
months before would have been a paradise to her, she shook herself free
of the scores of arms outstretched to keep her captive, and went out
into the night alone. She did not know what she ailed, but she was
restless, oppressed, weighed down with a sense of dissatisfied weariness
that had never before touched the joyous and elastic nature of the child
of France.

And this, too, in the moment when the very sweetest and loftiest of her
ambitions was attained! When her hand wandered to that decoration on her
heart which had been ever in her sight what the crown of wild olive and
the wreath of summer grasses were to the youths and to the victors
of the old, dead classic years! As she stood in solitude under the
brilliancy of the stars, tears, unfamiliar and unbidden, rose in her
eyes as they gazed over the hosts around her.

"How they live only for the slaughter! How they perish like the beasts
of the field!" she thought. Upon her, as on the poet or the patriot
who could translate and could utter the thought as she could not, there
weighed the burden of that heart-sick consciousness of the vanity of the
highest hope, the futility of the noblest effort, to bring light into
the darkness of the suffering, toiling, blind throngs of human life.

"There is only one thing worth doing--to die greatly!" thought the
aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously returning to the only
end that the genius an