France,
the Canche had been deepened and its mouth improved, not for uses of
commerce, but of warfare. Veteran soldier and raw recruit, bugler,
baker, and farrier, man who came to fight and man who came to write
about it, all had been turned into navvies, diggers, drivers of piles,
or of horses, or wheelbarrows, by the man who turned everybody into
his own teetotum. The Providence that guides the world showed mercy in
sending that engine of destruction before there was a Railway for him to
run upon.

Now Scudamore being of a different sort, and therefore having pleased
Napoleon (who detested any one at all of his own pattern), might have
been very well contented here, and certainly must have been so, if he
had been without those two windows. Many a bird has lost his nest, and
his eggs, and his mate, and even his own tail, by cocking his eyes to
the right and left, when he should have drawn their shutters up. And
why? Because the brilliance of his too projecting eyes has twinkled
through the leaves upon the narrow oblong of the pupils of a spotty-eyed
cat going stealthily under the comb of the hedge, with her stomach wired
in, and her spinal column fluted, to look like a wrinkled blackthorn
snag. But still worse is it for that poor thrush, or lintie, or robin,
or warbler-wren, if he flutters in his bosom when he spies that cat, and
sets up his feathers, and begins to hop about, making a sad little chirp
to his mate, and appealing to the sky to protect him and his family.

Blyth Scudamore's case was a mixture of those two. It would have been
better for his comfort if he had shut his eyes; but having opened them,
he should have stayed where he was, without any fluttering. However, he
acted for the best; and when a man does that, can those who never do so
find a word to say against him?

According to the best of his recollection, which was generally near the
mark, it was upon Christmas Eve, A.D. 1804, that his curiosity was first
aroused. He had made up his room to look a little bit like home, with
a few sprigs of holly, and a sheaf of laurel, not placed daintily as a
lady dresses them, but as sprightly as a man can make them look, and as
bright as a captive Christmas could expect. The decorator shed a little
sigh--if that expression may be pardoned by analogy, for he certainly
neither fetched nor heaved it--and then he lit his pipe to reflect upon
home blessings, and consider the free world outside, in which he had
very