ess the local mode than it had been to
carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can only be
gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.

A week or two after my arrival the villagers began to train, under
the conduct of a stout military-looking personage, who had been in the
Belgian cavalry and _gendarmerie_, and was now in honourable
retirement from war's alarms as a grocer. He traded under the name of
Dorn-Casart--the wife's maiden name being tacked to his own, after the
manner of the country. This habit, by the way, gives a certain flavour
of aristocracy to the trading names over even the smallest shop windows.
'Coqueline-Walhaert, _negotiant_,' is the sign over the establishment
wherein a very infirm old woman sells centimes' worth of sweetstuff to
the _jeunesse_ of Janenne, whilst her husband works at the quarries.

Monsieur Dorn is a man with a huge moustache, fat cheeks streaked with
scarlet lines on a bilious groundwork, and a voice raspy with much
Geneva and the habit of command. He rides with the unmistakable seat of
an old cavalry man, and his behaviour on horseback was a marked contrast
to that of the mounted contingent he drilled every day in the open
place in front of the hotel. His steed, artfully stimulated by the spur,
caracoled, danced, and lashed out with his hind feet, and Monsieur Dorn,
with one fist stuck against his own fat ribs, swayed to the motion with
admirable nonchalance. His voice, which has the barky tone inseparable
from military command, would ring about the square like the voice of a
commander-in-chief, and by the exercise of a practised imagination, I
could almost persuade myself that I stood face to face with the horrid
front of war.

When Monsieur Dorn was not drilling his brigade he was generally to be
found at the Cafe de la Regence, smoking a huge meerschaum with a cherry
wood stem and sipping Geneva. Even in this comparative retirement the
halo of his office clung about him, and seemed to hold men oflf from a
too familiar intercourse; but one afternoon I saw him unbending there.
He was nearly always accompanied by a dog, spotlessly white, the most
ladylike of her species I remember to have seen. Her jet-black beady
eyes and jet-black glittering nose set oflf the snowy whiteness of her
coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a refined, coquettish,
mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak the agreeable sense she
had of her own cha