se inhabitants are all suspected by the police and live under the
ban. Of course on such a gala-day of lawlessness this hive was all
astir. At a village I passed through I tried to hire a conveyance to
Argenteuil. I also tried to get some railway information, but nobody
could tell me anything and all were ravenous for news. I secured,
however, without losing too much time, a seat with a stout young
country-man who drove a little country cart with a powerful gray horse,
and was going in the direction I wanted to travel.

"What will be the result of this affair?" I said to him when he had got
his beast into a steady trot.

He shrugged his shoulders. A French workingman has a far larger
vocabulary at his command than the English laborer. "Bon Dieu!" he
exclaimed: "who knows what will come of it? A land without a master is
no civilized land. We shall fall back into barbarism. What there is
certain is, that we shall all be ruined."

At length, to my great relief, we saw a carriage before us; and we drove
into the railway-station at the same moment as the Leares.

Before the ladies could alight I was beside the window of their
carriage.

"You here, Mr. Farquhar?" cried Hermione. "How good of you! You cannot
guess the relief. Help me to get them out, these helpless ones."

We lifted Mrs. Leare on to the platform of the railway, weeping and
trembling. The old colored nurse could not speak French, and seemed to
think her only duty was to hold the hand of little Claribel and to stand
where her young mistress placed her. All looked to Hermione. She carried
a canvas bag of five-franc pieces and paid right and left. I tried to
interfere, as she was giving the postilion an exorbitant sum.

"No, hush!" she whispered: "we can afford to pay, but in our situation
we cannot afford to dispute."

She then deputed me to see after the "baggage," as she called the
luggage of the party, and went with her mother into the glass cage that
the French call a _salle d'attente_ at a railway-station.

We had come from the seat of war, and every one crowded around us asking
for news. I had little to tell, but replied that I believed the affair
was nearly over. I did not foresee that two hours later a procession
roaring "Mourir pour la Patrie" under the windows of the Hotel des
Affaires Etrangeres would be fired into by accident, and that the
_emeute_ of February, 1848, would be converted into a revolution.

It was nine o'clock in the evening.