ed; and I did so with an eagerness as if the world
depended on my haste. At any other time I would have bethought me of my
disobedience to the pere's commands, and looked forward to meeting him
with shame and sorrow, but now I felt a kind of importance in the charge
intrusted to me. I regarded my mission as something superior to any
petty consideration of self, while the very proximity in which I had
stood to peril and death made me seem a hero in my own eyes.

At last I reached the street where we lived, and, almost breathless with
exertion, gained the door. What was my amazement, however, to find it
guarded by a sentry, a large, solemn-looking fellow, with a tattered
cocked-hat on his head, and a pair of worn striped trousers on his
legs, who cried out, as I appeared, 'Halte-la!' in a voice that at once
arrested my steps.

'Where to, youngster?' said he, in a somewhat melted tone, seeing the
shock his first words had caused me.

'I am going home, sir,' said I submissively; 'I live at the third
storey, in the apartment of the Pere Michel.'

'The Pere Michel will live there no longer, my boy; his apartment is now
in the Temple,' said he slowly.

'In the Temple!' said I, whose memory at once recalled my father's fate;
and then, unable to control my feelings, I sat down upon the steps and
burst into tears.

'There, there, child, you must not cry thus,' said he; 'these are not
days when one should weep over misfortunes; they come too fast and too
thick on all of us for that. The pere was your tutor, I suppose?'

I nodded.

'And your father--where is he?'

'Dead.'

He made a sign to imitate the guillotine, and I assented by another nod.

'Was he a Royalist, boy?'

'He was an officer in the Garde du Corps,' said I proudly. The soldier
shook his head mournfully, but with what meaning I know not.

'And your mother, boy?'

'I do not know where she is,' said I, again relapsing into tears at the
thought of my utter desolation. The old soldier leaned upon his musket
in profound thought, and for some time did not utter a word. At last he
said--

'There is nothing but the Hotel de Ville for you, my child. They say
that the Republic adopts all the orphans of France. What she does with
them I cannot tell.'

'But I can, though,' replied I fiercely; 'the Noyades or the Seine are
a quick and sure provision; I saw eighty drowned one morning below the
Pont Neuf myself.'

'That tongue of yours will bring you into trou