the shouting crowds of
the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the
waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to
make their feast. "_Voila tes secondes noces!_" she cried where she
stood, and laughed by the side of the gray angry water, watching the
tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed
weed.

* * *

"There is only one thing worth doing--to die greatly!" thought the
aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously returning to the only
end that the genius and the greatness of Greece could find as issue to
the terrible jest, the mysterious despair, of all existence.

* * *

A very old man--one who had been a conscript in the bands of Young
France, and marched from his Pyrenean village to the battle-tramp of the
Marseillaise, and charged with the Enfans de Paris across the plains of
Gemappes; who had known the passage of the Alps, and lifted the long
curls from the dead brow of Desaix, at Marengo, and seen in the sultry
noonday dust of a glorious summer the Guard march into Paris, while the
people laughed and wept with joy, surging like the mighty sea around one
pale frail form, so young by years, so absolute by genius.

A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with bereavement,
with extreme old age; and by a long course of cruel accidents, alone,
here in Africa, without one left of the friends of his youth, or of the
children of his name, and deprived even of the charities due from his
country to his services--alone save for the little Friend of the Flag,
who, for four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, in
this Moorish attic, tending him herself when in town, taking heed that
he should want for nothing when she was campaigning.

She hid, as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide a sin,
had she chosen to commit one, this compassion which she, the young
_condottiera_ of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier
of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as
the dove, her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her
contemptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar.
In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred the
eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the
breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Kellerman, the
Cuirassiers of Milhaud;