irl's, and through whose
long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were stealing as his rosy mouth
murmured, "Mere! Mere! Pauvre mere!" He was a young conscript taken from
the glad vine-country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in
the rock beside the sunny, brimming river, and half-buried under its
grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the palace to its
heir. There were many others beside these; and Cecil looked at them with
those weary, speculative, meditative fancies which, very alien to his
temperament, stole on him occasionally in the privations and loneliness
of his existence here--loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most
painful of all solitude.

Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaigning, in
the excitement of warfare; there were times even when it yielded him
absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests more genuine and vivid
than any he had known in his former world. But, in the monotony and the
confinement of the barrack routine, his days were often intolerable to
him. Morning after morning he rose to the same weary round of duty, the
same series of petty irritations, of physical privations, of irksome
repetitions, to take a toss of black, rough coffee, and begin the day
knowing it would bring with it endless annoyances without one gleam
of hope. Rose to spend hours on the exercise-ground in the glare of a
burning sun, railed at if a trooper's accouterments were awry, or
an insubordinate scoundrel had pawned his regulation shirt; to be
incessantly witness of tyrannies and cruelties he was powerless to
prevent, and which he continually saw undo all he had done, and render
men desperate whom he had spent months in endeavoring to make contented;
to have as the only diversions for his few instants of leisure loathsome
pleasures that disgusted the senses they were meant to indulge, and
that brought him to scenes of low debauchery from which all the old,
fastidious instincts of his delicate, luxurious taste recoiled. With
such a life as this, he often wondered regretfully why, out of the many
Arab swords that had crossed his own, none had gone straight to his
heart; why, out of the many wounds that had kept him hovering on
the confines of the grave, none had ever brought him the end and the
oblivion of death.

Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hardships of his
present career, but had only owned the power to command, to pardon,
to lead, and to di