e
top and covered with a cold napkin, from under which stick out the neck
of a bottle and a twig of holly.

What on earth can the old miser want with all this? Can it be possible
that he means to celebrate Christmas himself? Does he mean to have a
family reunion and drink to the German fatherland? Impossible! Everybody
knows old Cahn has no country. His fatherland is his strong box. And,
moreover, he has neither family nor friends,--nothing but debtors. His
sons and his associates are gone away long ago with the army. They
traffic in the rear among the wagons, vending the water of life, buying
watches, and, on nights of battle, emptying the pockets of the dead, or
rifling the baggage tumbled in the ditches of the route.

Too old to follow his children, Father Cahn has remained in Bavaria,
where he has made magnificent profits from the French prisoners of war.
He is always prowling about the barracks to buy watches, shoulder-knots,
medals, post-orders. You may see him glide through the hospitals, beside
the ambulances. He approaches the beds of the wounded and demands, in a
low, hideous growl,--

"Haf you anyting to sell?"

And, hold! At this same moment, the reason he trots so gayly with his
basket under his arm, is solely that the military hospital closes at
five o'clock, and that there are two Frenchmen who await him high up in
that tall black building with straight, iron-barred windows, where
Christmas finds nothing to welcome her approach save the pale lights
which guard the pillows of the dying.

II.

These two Frenchmen are named Salvette and Bernadou. They are
infantrymen from the same village of Provence, enrolled in the same
battalion, and wounded by the same shell. But Salvette had the stronger
frame, and already he begins to grow convalescent, to take a few steps
from his bed towards the window.

Bernadou, though, will never be cured. Through the pale curtains of the
hospital bed, his figure looks more meagre, more languished day by day;
and when he speaks of his home, of return thither, it is with that sad
smile of the sick wherein there is more of resignation than of hope.

To-day, now, he is a little animated by the thought of the cheerful
Christmas time, which, in our country of Provence, is like a grand
bonfire of joy lighted in the midst of winter; by remembrance of the
departure for Mass at midnight; the church bedecked and luminous; the
dark streets of the village full of people; then the