him as Bertie
Cecil.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE.

"Oh! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings of Europe," said
Claude de Chanrellon, dashing some vermouth off his golden mustaches,
where he lay full-length on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Place
du Gouvernement, where the lamps were just lit, and shining through
the burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored,
many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were all
fluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored moths.

"Hein! Diamonds are found in the rag-picker's sweepings," growled a
General of Division, who was the most terrible martinet in the whole of
the French service, but who loved "my children of hell," as he was wont
to term his men, with a great love, and who would never hear another
disparage them, however he might order them blows of the stick, or exile
them to Beylick himself.

"You are poetic, mon General," said Claude de Chanrellon; "but you
are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned into
Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, and
one at which France has no equal."

"But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that the
devil made them if the drill have molded them!" urged a Colonel of
Tirailleurs Indigenes.

Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar.

"Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in this
world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets,
proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge of
life, but devilry is its champagne!"

"Ventre bleu!" growled the General. "We have a right to praise the
blackguards; without them our conscripts would be very poor trash. The
conscript fights because he has to fight; the blackguard fights because
he loves to fight. A great difference that."

The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale effeminate,
dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger than a hot-house
flower, yet who, as many an African chronicle could tell, was swift as
fire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard's leap, untiring as an Indian
on trail, once in the field with his Indigenes.

"In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, mon
General," he murmured; "what the catalogue of your crimes must be!"

The tough old campaigner laughed grimly; he took it as a high
compliment.

"Sapristi! The car