an a timid knock on the door was heard, and the good woman of the
house appeared, to ask with more or less trepidation if they had
suffered any loss from the visit of her countrymen, whose uniforms she
must have recognized.

Rod assured her that all was well with them, at which she seemed
particularly pleased, and vanished from the scene.

"Well, after all it turned out to be a false alarm," ventured Hanky
Panky, giving an exhibition of one of his fancy yawns; and really no boy
could excel him when it came to stretching his mouth wide open, so Josh
always declared.

"But it might have been serious, all right," asserted the latter. "Our
luck only caused them to be French instead of German. It was what you
might call a narrow squeak, Hanky Panky; and only for my waking up when
I did we'd have lost our property anyway."

"We owe you our best thanks for your wakefulness, Josh," Rod told him.

"Oh! that's all right," laughed the other; "thanks to a bad dream I
chanced to arouse myself, and caught the flicker of some sort of moving
light out there. So of course I just tumbled out and made for the
window. When I saw lanterns moving this way and that I began to think we
were going to be in the soup; so, knowing you ought to be put in touch
with the situation, I wakened you, Rod."

"By the way," Hanky Panky continued, "what was the lieutenant telling
you all the time he kept on talking, Rod?"

"That's so," echoed Josh immediately; "whatever it could have been it
seemed to give him a whole lot of pleasure to be able to inform you, for
he was smiling like everything, and I could see the pride sticking out
of his face."

"Oh! I was asking him for the latest news from the battle front,"
replied Rod, "and what he told me was great stuff, to be sure. It seems
that what we heard before was part of the truth."

"You mean how the German General Von Kluck, swinging down to attack
Paris from the northwest, didn't get within gunshot of the outer forts
before he found he had exposed his flank, and it was in danger of being
turned--was that it, Rod?" and Josh, who was intensely interested in all
military matters, eagerly waited to hear the answer to his leading
question.

"Just what happened," Rod explained. "You see, a new army was hastily
gotten together by General Gallieni, the Governor of Paris, consisting
for the most part of the regiments meant to defend the city. This,
assisted by the British forces, was threatening the exp