uits which filled up my leisure hours; and thus my little
flower-garden, stolen from an angle of the glacis, was to me a domain
of matchless beauty. Every spare moment of my time was passed here,
and every little saving of my humble pay was expended on this spot. The
rose, the clematis, and the jessamine here twined their twigs together
to make an arbor, in which I used to sit at evening, gazing out upon the
spreading Rhine, or watching the sunset on the Vosges mountains. I had
trained myself not to think of the great events of the world, momentous
and important as they then were, and great with the destiny of mankind.
I never saw a newspaper,--I held no intercourse with others; to me life
had resolved itself into the very simplest of all episodes,--it was mere
existence, and no more.

This dream might possibly have ended without a waking shock, and the
long night of the grave have succeeded to the dim twilight of oblivion,
had not an event occurred to rouse me from my stupor, and bring me back
to life and its troubles.

An order had arrived from Paris to put the fortress into a state of
perfect defence. New redoubts and bastions were to be erected, the
ditches widened, and an additional force of guns to be mounted on the
walls. The telegraph had brought the news in the morning, and ere the
sunset that same evening my little garden was a desert; all my care and
toil scattered to the winds; the painful work of long months in ruin,
and my one sole object in life obliterated and gone. I had thought that
all emotions were long since dead within me. I fervently believed that
every well of feeling was dry and exhausted in my nature; but I cried
and cried bitterly as I beheld this desolation. There seemed to my eyes
a wantonness in the cruelty thus inflicted, and in my heart I inveighed
against the ruthless passions of men, and the depravity by which their
actions are directed. Was the world too much a paradise for me, I
asked, that this small spot of earth could not be spared to me? Was I
over-covetous in craving this one corner of the vast universe? In
my folly and my selfishness I fancied myself the especial mark of
adversity, and henceforth I vowed a reckless front to fortune.

He who lives for himself alone, has not only to pay the penalty of
unguided counsels, but the far heavier one of following impulses
of which egotism is the mainspring. The care for others, the
responsibilities of watching over and protecting somet