e people
stared at the slender guns, mute, canvas-covered, tilted skyward.
They stared, too, at the barred cars, rolling past in interminable
trains, loaded with horses and canvas-jacketed troopers who peered
between the slats and shouted to the women in the street. Other
trains came and went, trains weighted with bellowing cattle or
huddled sheep, trains choked with small square boxes marked
"Cartouches" or "Obus--7^me"; trains piled high with grain or
clothing, or folded tents packed between varnished poles and piles
of tin basins. Once a little excitement came to Saint-Lys when a
battalion of red-legged infantry tramped into the village square
and stacked rifles and jeered at the mayor and drank many bottles
of red wine to the health of the shy-eyed girls peeping at them
from every lattice. But they were only waiting for the next train,
and when it came their bugles echoed from the bridge to the square,
and they went away--went where the others had gone--laughing,
singing, cheering from the car-windows, where the sun beat down
on their red caps, and set their buttons glittering like a million
swarming fire-flies.

The village life, the daily duties, the dull routine from the
vineyard to the grain-field, and from the etang to the forest had
not changed in Saint-Lys.

There might be war somewhere; it would never come to Saint-Lys.
There might be death, yonder towards the Rhine--probably beyond
it, far beyond it. What of it? Death comes to all, but it comes
slowly in Saint-Lys; and the days are long, and one must eat to
live, and there is much to be done between the rising and the
setting of a peasant's sun.

There, below in Paris, were wise heads and many soldiers. They,
in Paris, knew what to do, and the war might begin and end with
nothing but a soiled newspaper in the Cafe Saint-Lys to show for
it--as far as the people of Saint-Lys knew.

True, at the summons of the mayor, the National Guard of
Saint-Lys mustered in the square, seven strong and a bugler. This
was merely a display of force--it meant nothing--but let those
across the Rhine beware!

The fierce little man with the gray mustache, who was named
Tricasse, and who commanded the Saint-Lys Pompiers, spoke gravely
of Francs-corps, and drank too much eau-de-vie every evening. But
these warlike ebullitions simmered away peacefully in the
sunshine, and the tranquil current of life flowed as smoothly
through Saint-Lys as the river Lisse itself, limpid, no