se wall of yellow clay, looked
like new-made graves, lent the plain something of the character and
local colouring of a battle-field. The ear had a larger share in the
mighty work of the day than the eye. From the sides, the front, the
rear, everywhere, cannon thundered, at a short distance on the right
echoed the rattle of a sharp fire of musketry, while the terrible,
ceaseless roar which filled the air alternately swelled and sank, like
the rising and falling flood of melody of a vast orchestra, during the
storm of the pastoral symphony.

A number of officers had assembled on a little mound in front of the
regiment of dragoons, whence they were attentively watching the French.
Among them a major stood smoking a cigarette and gazing dreamily into
vacancy. He was a man a little under thirty, with a slender figure,
somewhat above middle height, and a pale, narrow face, to which cold
grey eyes, and a scornful expression resting upon the colourless lips
shaded by a blond mustache inclining to red, lent a stern, by no means
winning expression. In this environment of human beings, amid these
excited young men with their healthful, sunburnt faces, he, with his
impassive, reserved expression and somewhat listless bearing, looked
strangely weary and worn. A woman's eye gazing at the group of
officers would scarcely have regarded him with favour; a man's would
have singled him out as the most intellectual of them all.

Removing his helmet and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with
his handkerchief, he displayed a head on which the hair was already
growing thin and, at the same time, a well-kept, aristocratic hand,
with long, thin, bloodless fingers. His whole appearance, even in the
levelling uniform, revealed a man of exalted rank. And, in fact, this
officer was Prince Louis of Hochstein-Falkenburg-Gerau, the head of a
non-reigning line of a German princely race.

Orphaned at an early age, he found himself at eighteen when, by the
rules of his House, he attained his majority, in the unrestricted
possession of a yearly income of several millions. From his mother, a
very fine musician, he inherited artistic tastes and a keen
appreciation of the beautiful; from his haughty and somewhat eccentric
father a rugged, independent nature, which found every external
constraint intolerable and wished to obey only the law of its own will.

It requires little power of imagination to picture how the world looks
to the eyes