isn't a mouth he's got in his head, it's a snout. The
wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it's coal. Clay
pipes, they'll stick it better, but he roasts 'em brown all the same.
Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I'm telling you, he'll come
to what doesn't ever happen often; through being forced to get
white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe'll explode in his nose
before everybody. You'll see."

Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the
barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The lines
of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by side in
their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth diversified
snoring.

With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to me
about himself: "I'm a buyer of rags, you know," he says, "or to put it
better, a rag merchant. But me, I'm wholesale; I buy from the little
rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop--a warehouse mind
you!--which I use as a depot. I deal in all kinds of rags, from linen
to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks, and old shoes; and
naturally, I make a specialty of rabbit-skins."

And a little later I still hear him: "As for me, little and
queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred
pounds' weight to the warehouse, up the steps, and my feet in sabots.
Once I had a to-do with a person--"

"What I can't abide," cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, "is the
exercises and marches they give us when we're resting. My back's
mincemeat, and I can't get a snooze even, I'm that cramped."

There is a metallic noise in Volpatte's direction. He has decided to
take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault of
its perforations.

One who is but half asleep groans, "Oh, la, la! When will this war
finish!"

A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth--"They'd take
the very skin off us!"

There follows a single, "Don't fret yourself!" as darkly inconsequent
as the cry of revolt.

I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o'clock is striking; and in a
pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the agitated
silhouette of Pinegal. A cock has crowed afar. Pinegal raises himself
halfway to a sitting position, and I hear his husky voice: "Well now,
it's the middle of the night, and there's a cock loosing his jaw. He's
blind drunk, that cock." He laughs, and repeats, "He's blind,