ould have held by to the death, if tried--a
truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as only fit for cowards, and
a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.

* * *

Tired as over-worked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out
homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed
himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives which
had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him
strength, it had also given him sympathy.

* * *

And he did her that injustice which the best amongst us are apt to do to
those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that
closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and
complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvellously involved, of human
nature.

* * *

The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of the morning, and the
day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its
peace; the carnage went on hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk with
slaughter as with raki. It was sublimely grand; it was hideously
hateful--this wild-beast struggle, that heaving tumult of striving lives
that ever and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke from it
as the lightning from the night. The sun laughed in its warmth over a
thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas lying northward, and over
the yellow sands of the south; but the touch of its heat only made the
flame in their blood burn fiercer; and the fulness of its light only
served to show them clearer where to strike, and how to slay.

* * *

She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a
child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more
than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette
would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc.
The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable
patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and
unnumbered sufferings of the people, were in her instinctive and inborn,
as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her
now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the
crowding soldiery.

* * *

After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau which side of
the question to take. On my life, civilisation develops comfort,