d date with
the words 'Take Him for All in All We shall not Look upon his
Like again.' The bust, executed in plaster of Paris, will be
replaced by marble when funds allow. The crowd dispersed in
silence after the ceremony. Dancing in the street followed at
6 p.m., and was kept up with spirit for some hours, during which
a large quantity of beer was given away."

The Major lay in the next room--the casualty ward--and stared up at
the whitewashed ceiling.

His whole being ached as though, mind and body, he had been set
upon and beaten senseless with bladders. And this was the second
time! Yes--good heavens, how had he deserved it?--the second time!
He remembered, after the disaster off Boulogne--many days after--
awaking to consciousness in his prison bed in the fortress of Givet.
Then, as now, he had lain staring, his whole soul sickened by the
cruel jar of the jest. Hand of fate, was it? Nay, a jocose and
blundering finger, rather, that had flipped him, as a man might flip
a beetle, into the night. Then, as now, his soul had welled up in
sullen indignation. He blamed no one; for in all the stupid chapter
of accidents there was no one to blame. But when the Protestant
chaplain in Givet came to his bed he turned his face to the wall.

He refused to give his name. He did not understand this blind
malevolence of fate, but he would make no terms with it. He--Solomon
Hymen--had a will of his own and a proper pride. If the world chose
to use him so, after all his services to mankind, let it go and be
damned to it. I tell you, the man had courage.

If his friends at home valued him, let them seek him out. He had
given them cause enough for gratitude. If not, he asked nothing of
them. In the prison he gave his name as Mr. Solomon.

Yet he had made two attempts to escape. In the first he ran away
with two comrades as far as Mezieres. Being pursued by the
_gens-d'armes_ there, and called upon to surrender, his companions
had given themselves up. Not so our hero; nor was he secured until
he lay unconscious with a bullet-hole in the cheek. It was this
which ever afterwards affected his speech, the bullet having cut or
partially paralysed some string of the tongue.

It had been touch-and-go with him; but he recovered, and, passing
henceforward as a desperate character, was drafted south with a dozen
other desperate characters to the gloomy fortress of Briancon.
There, in a sec