child even now,
my dear mistress would say), I also had one dear to me--with the Red
Prince and the army before Orleans.

Herr postmaster Schwartz--ah! he came to talk to my mistress and to
bring letters to her from her brave husband, and I was sewing, or busy
in the room, and heard all--as he would stay in the kitchen on his way
out and tell us all about it--Bertha and me; and once he handed me a
letter.

Oh! how my hand trembled as I took it; how the Herr postmaster looked at
me through his horn spectacles and watched me, for he knew the writing!
it was his son's, the writing of Franz. And I felt the blood rush up hot
to my face, and the tears blind me as I placed in my bodice the little
letter that I dare not open while there were questioning eyes to ask:
"What is he to thee, Lisba, and what says he?"

Bertha knew. Bertha was yet more of a child than I, for she was two
years younger, but old was she in sentiment, and too often we would talk
together far into the night, but in whispers lest we should wake the
little ones, for Bertha slept next the great nursery, where our mistress
had also made her bed, and I would steal into her room to pore over the
map that the Herr postmaster had drawn with his pencil in the kitchen to
show where our armies had been, and where the cruel battles were fought.
In Alsace and to Lorraine, by Neiderbronn, at Weissenburg, at Woerth,
at Saarbruck, at Metz, at Sedan, "where," said Herr postmaster, "we have
received the sword of the Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who is now
our prisoner in the Palace of the Habichtswald."

Then--ah! me, to think that they should be taken to the end of the
world--right into France, to Donchery, to Chalons. As near as
Strasbourg, as far as Rheims, and then on to Paris--or near it--at the
place called Nogent-sur-Marne; that is where our dear master, the
ober-lieutenant, was with the army of the Crown Prince; and we grieved
and waited, for he had had a wound, we heard, though now he was healed.
And the fighting went on, though hundreds of our brave men of the
troops--the landwehr, the reserve--were hurt, or maimed, or killed. And
many women wept over their knitting or their spinning; and the coming of
the holy Christmas time brought not peace, though the Herr postmaster
said the hungry war was now nearly over, but its jaws were not yet done
clinking, and would yet gnash many to death.

Franz! ah! he was with the Red Prince at Orleans, where they had fou