epented; put back the Napoleons, closed the little
sack, ran as hard as he could scamper to his destination, delivered his
charge into the fair lady's own hands, and relieved his feelings by a
score of somersaults along the pavement as fast as ever he could go.

"Ma cantche!" he thought, as he stood on his head, with his legs at an
acute angle in the air, in position very favored by him for moments of
reflection--he said his brain worked better upside down. "Ma cantche!
What a weakness, what a weakness! What remorse to have yielded to it!
Beneath you, Picpon--utterly beneath you. Just because that ci-devant
says such follies please him in us!"

Picpon (then in his gamin stage) had been enrolled in the Chasseurs
at the same time with the "ci-devant," as they called Bertie, and,
following his gamin nature, had exhausted all his resources
of impudence, maliciousness, and power of tormenting, on the
"aristocrat"--somewhat disappointed, however, that the utmost
ingenuities of his insolence and even his malignity never succeeded in
breaking the "aristocrat's" silence and contemptuous forbearance from
all reprisal. For the first two years the hell-on-earth--which life with
a Franco-Arab regiment seemed to Cecil--was a hundredfold embittered by
the brutalized jests and mosquito-like torments of this little odious
chimpanzee of Paris.

One day, however, it chanced that a detachment of Chasseurs, of which
Cecil was one, was cut to pieces by such an overwhelming mass of Arabs
that scarce a dozen of them could force their way through the Bedouins
with life; he was among those few, and a flight at full speed was the
sole chance of regaining their encampment. Just as he had shaken his
bridle free of the Arab's clutch, and had mowed himself a clear path
through their ranks, he caught sight of his young enemy, Picpon, on the
ground, with a lance broken off in his ribs; guarding his head, with
bleeding hands, as the horses trampled over him. To make a dash at the
boy, though to linger a moment was to risk certain death; to send his
steel through an Arab who came in his way; to lean down and catch hold
of the lad's sash; to swing him up into his saddle and throw him
across it in front of him, and to charge afresh through the storm of
musket-balls, and ride on thus burdened, was the work of ten seconds
with "Bel-a-faire-peur." And he brought the boy safe over a stretch of
six leagues in a flight for life, though the imp no more deserved