ible martial strain which helped to make everything like a
dream.

Already at that time Claude, in addition to his powder-flask and
cartridge-belt, took with him an album, in which he sketched little bits
of country, while Sandoz, on his side, always had some favourite poet
in his pocket. They lived in a perfect frenzy of romanticism, winged
strophes alternated with coarse garrison stories, odes were flung upon
the burning, flashing, luminous atmosphere that enwrapt them. And when
perchance they came upon a small rivulet, bordered by half a dozen
willows, casting grey shadows on the soil all ablaze with colour, they
at once went into the seventh heaven. They there by themselves performed
the dramas they knew by heart, inflating their voices when repeating
the speeches of the heroes, and reducing them to the merest whisper when
they replied as queens and love-sick maidens. On such days the sparrows
were left in peace. In that remote province, amidst the sleepy stupidity
of that small town, they had thus lived on from the age of fourteen,
full of enthusiasm, devoured by a passion for literature and art. The
magnificent scenarios devised by Victor Hugo, the gigantic phantasies
which fought therein amidst a ceaseless cross-fire of antithesis, had
at first transported them into the fulness of epic glory; gesticulating,
watching the sun decline behind some ruins, seeing life pass by amidst
all the superb but false glitter of a fifth act. Then Musset had come to
unman them with his passion and his tears; they heard their own hearts
throb in response to his, a new world opened to them--a world more
human--that conquered them by its cries for pity, and of eternal misery,
which henceforth they were to hear rising from all things. Besides,
they were not difficult to please; they showed the voracity of youth,
a furious appetite for all kinds of literature, good and bad alike. So
eager were they to admire something, that often the most execrable works
threw them into a state of exaltation similar to that which the purest
masterpieces produce.

And as Sandoz now remarked, it was their great love of bodily exercise,
their very revels of literature that had protected them against the
numbing influence of their ordinary surroundings. They never entered a
cafe, they had a horror of the streets, even pretending to moult in
them like caged eagles, whereas their schoolfellows were already rubbing
their elbows over the small marble tables a