cold, of shot-wounds, of
racking bodily pains--stole from it, in his eyes, that poetry and that
picturesque brilliancy which it bore to the sight of the artist and the
amateur. He knew the naked terrors of war, the agony, the travail,
the icy chills, the sirocco heats, the grinding routine, the pitiless
chastisements of its reality; to those who do, it can no longer be a
spectacle dressed in the splendid array of romance. It is a fearful
tragedy and farce woven close one in another; and its sole joy is in
that blood-thirst which men so lustfully share with the tiger, and yet
shudder from when they have sated it.

It was this knowledge of war, in its bitter and deadly truth, which
had made him give the answer that had charmed Cigarette, to the casual
visitor of the encampment.

He sat now, having recovered from the effects of the day of Zaraila,
within a little distance of the fire at which his men were stewing some
soup in the great simmering copper bowl. They had eaten nothing for nigh
a week, except some moldy bread, with the chance of a stray cat or a
shot bird to flavor it. Hunger was a common thorn in Algerian warfare,
since not even the matchless intendance of France could regularly
supply the troops across those interminable breadths of arid land, those
sun-scorched plains, swept by Arab foragers.

"Beau Victor! You took their parts well," said a voice behind him, as
Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and stood in the glow of the
fire, with a little pipe in her pretty rosebud mouth and her cap set
daintily on one side of her curls.

He looked up, and smiled.

"Not so well as your own clever tongue would have done. Words are not my
weapons."

"No! You are as silent as the grave commonly; but when you do speak,
you speak well," said the vivandiere condescendingly. "I hate silence
myself! Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round,
round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they
keep little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest."

With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into the night air,
looking the prettiest little genre picture in the ruddy firelight that
ever was painted on such a background of wavering shadow and undulating
flame.

"Will your allegory hold good, petite?" smiled Cecil, thinking but
little of his answer or of his companion, of whose service to him he
remained utterly ignorant. "I fancy speech is the chaff most