fields between Rheims city and the canal. A few clumps of
stunted trees, three wind-mills lifting their skeleton arms in the air,
were all there was to relieve the monotony of the gray waste, but above
the huddled roofs of Rheims, lost in the sea of foliage of the tall
chestnut-trees, the huge bulk of the cathedral with its slender spires
was profiled against the blue sky, looming colossal, notwithstanding
the distance, beside the modest houses. Memories of school and boyhood's
days came over him, the tasks he had learned and recited: all about the
_sacre_ of our kings, the _sainte ampoule_, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, all
the long list of glories of old France.

Then Maurice's thoughts reverted again to that unassuming bourgeoise
house, so mysterious in its solitude, and its imperial occupant; and
directing his eyes upon the high, yellow wall he was surprised to read,
scrawled there in great, awkward letters, the legend: _Vive Napoleon!_
among the meaningless obscenities traced by schoolboys. Winter's
storms and summer's sun had half effaced the lettering; evidently the
inscription was very ancient. How strange, to see upon that wall that
old heroic battle-cry, which probably had been placed there in honor of
the uncle, not of the nephew! It brought all his childhood back to him,
and Maurice was again a boy, scarcely out of his mother's arms, down
there in distant Chene-Populeux, listening to the stories of his
grandfather, a veteran of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, his
father, in the inglorious days that followed the collapse of the empire,
had been compelled to accept a humble position as collector, and there
the grandfather lived, with nothing to support him save his scanty
pension, in the poor home of the small public functionary, his sole
comfort to fight his battles o'er again for the benefit of his two
little twin grandchildren, the boy and the girl, a pair of golden-haired
youngsters to whom he was in some sense a mother. He would place Maurice
on his right knee and Henriette on his left, and then for hours on end
the narrative would run on in Homeric strain.

But small attention was paid to dates; his story was of the dire
shock of conflicting nations, and was not to be hampered by the
minute exactitude of the historian. Successively or together English,
Austrians, Prussians, Russians appeared upon the scene, according to the
then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances, and it was
not always an