s, so absolute by genius.

A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with bereavement,
with extreme old age; and, by a long course of cruel accidents, alone,
here in Africa, without one left of the friends of his youth, or of the
children of his name, and deprived even of the charities due from his
country to his services--alone, save for the little Friend of the Flag,
who, for four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, in
this Moorish attic; tending him herself when in town, taking heed that
he should want for nothing when she was campaigning.

"I will have a care of him," she had said curtly, when she had found him
in great misery and learned his history from others; and she had had
the care accordingly, maintaining him at her own cost in the Moorish
building, and paying a good Jewess of the quarter to tend him when she
was not herself in Algiers.

The old man was almost dead, mentally, though in bodily strength
still well able to know the physical comforts of food and rest, and
attendance; he was in his second childhood, in his ninetieth year, and
was unconscious of the debt he owed her; even, with a curious caprice of
decrepitude, he disliked her, and noticed nothing, except the raven when
it shrieked its "Tue! Tue! Tue!" But to Cigarette he was as sacred as
a god; had he not fought beneath the glance, and gazed upon the face of
the First Consul?

She bent over him now, saw that he slept, busied herself noiselessly in
brewing a little tin pot full of coffee and hot milk, set it over the
lamp to keep it warm, and placed it beside him ready for his morning
meal, with a roll of white wheat bread; then, with a glance round to
see that her other dependents wanted for nothing, went to her own garret
adjoining, and with the lattice fastened back, that the first rays of
sunrise and the first white flash of her friends the pigeons' gleaming
wings might awaken her, threw herself on her straw and slept with all
the graceful, careless rest of the childhood which, though in once sense
she had never known, yet in another had never forsaken her.

She hid as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide a sin,
had she chosen to commit one, this compassion which she, the young
condottiera of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier
of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery, imperious voice was gentle
as the dove; her wayward, dominant will was pliant as the reed; her
contemptuous,