, was severed at one blow from his body.
I understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been lit by
the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to be distinctly
unsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary, it seemed unhealthily
obese; its skin showed bare patches of an unpleasant character. However,
they had not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. He was
large . . . He was eaten . . . The rest is silence . . .

A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:

"I could not have eaten that dog."

And his grandmother remarks with a smile:

"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."

I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been reduced to
eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language
of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on
ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake,
of nondescript dishes containing things without a name--but of the
Lithuanian village dog--never! I wish it to be distinctly understood
that it is not I but my grand-uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed
gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, &c. &c., who, in his young
days, had eaten the Lithuanian dog.

I wish he had not. The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to
the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. Still if he really
had to, let us charitably remember that he had eaten him on active
service, while bearing up bravely against the greatest military disaster
of modern history, and, in a manner, for the sake of his country. He had
eaten him to appease his hunger no doubt, but also for the sake of an
unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith that
lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled like a false
beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a brave nation.

Pro patria!

Looked at in that light it appears a sweet and decorous meal.

And looked at in the same light my own diet of la vache enragee appears
a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for why should I,
the son of a land which such men as these have turned up with their
ploughshares and bedewed with their blood, undertake the pursuit of
fantastic meals of salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas? On
the kindest view it seems an unanswerable question. Alas! I have the
conviction that there are men of unstain